View from the Sofa: God gets the blame for Linford Christie’s failed drug test. Ah, bless

Fern Britton Meets Linford Christie, BBC1

(BBC)

It’s amazing how far special effects have come in the last few decades. E.T. was aired on Saturday night and the famous scene where Elliott and the alien fly through the air on BMX bikes looked all of its 33 years old. It was outshone by the BBC’s efforts yesterday morning, when the CGI boffins managed to erase every visual trace of the massive chip on Linford Christie’s shoulder.

But boy, is it still there, as we heard in an hour-long show dedicated to the notoriously prickly sprinter, Fern Britton’s latest interviewee in a series of religiously tinged programmes for the lead-up to Christmas.

Yes, there was a bit of God in there – annoyingly used, as He so often is, as a crutch when things haven’t gone swimmingly. Like Christie’s failed drug test.

In the midst of dancing around the topic, Britton asked: “How do you reconcile with a God that has given so much but has allowed for so much to be taken away?”

Note the passive voice, insinuating that God was the one to blame for the positive test for steroids in 1999, rather than the person in whose body the traces of nandrolone were found. For the record, Christie answered by saying he was “blessed”.

There was further juice in the hour-long show, which did not portray Christie in the best light. The section on his feud with Sebastian Coe early this century, when Christie had accused athletics of being corrupt (who’d have thought it?), was a classic and we learned that their acrimony stretched all the way to London 2012.

Christie was a notable absence at the London Games and it was largely down to his planet-sized ego that he was not on display. Rather than the future of athletics, the legacy and all the malarkey that Coe had sold the Games to us on, Christie thought it should be all about him.

“I got an invitation to appear in the background somewhere, ushered on,” he said. “For me, I am not that kind of person. For the history and what I have done for the sport, to the biggest sporting spectacle, they wanted me ushered on as if I didn’t exist. So I turned it down.”

There were more occasions of mirth that had no place in a Sunday morning soft-focus chat centred on the Christian appropriation of the winter solstice festival. Like when Christie said, without a shred of irony, about his sprinting rival Carl Lewis: “The problem with Carl is that there is no humility at all.”

Or when he blamed “them” for his drug scare at the 1988 Olympics. On testing positive for traces of a stimulant, he said: “‘They’ say that whatever is in your system you are responsible for.” Strange, that.

This statement came after he attempted to fob Britton off with “it was a long time ago” when she brought up the incident, apparently blamed on ginseng tea. “I’ve never drunk it in my life,” Christie confirmed. Which begs the question... no, we’ll leave it.

As with flying BMX bikes and vanishing chips, sometimes it is easier to suspend disbelief. A bit like Christianity, really.