Top European Track Officials Are Worried : Fear That Money, Drugs Could Really Ruin the Sport

Europe’s top track and field official fears that drugs and money could wreck the sport.

“While the sport appears to be on the crest of a wave, some of us fear it may be heading for the rocks--and those rocks may well be labelled drugs and money,” said Sir Arthur Gold, British president of the European Amateur Athletic Assn. for the last 11 years.

“In the short term, the sport is putting a lot of money in a few pockets. Long term, I can only look at the Classical Olympics which went on for 800 years but were finally destroyed by money and politics. I have been described as being a Victorian amateur--living in the past. I’m not. I am desperately keen that my sport should survive to the next century.

“But what worries me is that if it treads the path it is now on, whether it will survive in an acceptable form. There is nothing wrong with being a professional. But accept it for what it is. If you are a professional, you are a paid entertainer and 99.9% of people in most sports are paid entertainers.

“Sport is often very good entertainment, but entertainment is not necessarily good sport.”

The 70-year-old Briton is concerned that the vast amounts of money that have come into track and field in the past few years through television and sponsorship may ultimately cripple the sport.

“Remember, this money is not being generated from within the sport. It is being generated by sponsors and television companies and there is a danger that constant repetition--the same runners running round the same 400 meters track every second night in the summer--will ultimately become dull, and if it ceases to entertain the public, either directly at the stadium or indirectly through television, they won’t support it.

“I do not think that the Mobil grand prix has made a big impact on the sports world. It has benefited some of the lesser athletes, but I am not convinced of its success.

“Now it’s a possibility, to put it no more strongly than that, that these track meets which attract the stars with substantial payments and inducements, participation money and so on . . . could suddenly find themselves without enough money to honor their commitments. They will disappear.”

Gold is also worried that the Olympic Movement is not doing enough to end the use of banned drugs by athletes.

“There is a simple way to stop drug abuse worldwide and all it needs is the clout of the International Olympic Committee,” he said. “Some individual governing bodies have said it would be very difficult to test all year round in some countries. But all the IOC need to do is add one sentence or clause to the eligibility rule, rule 26.

“That extra sentence should read that an athlete will be eligible to compete in the Olympics only if he is willing to provide a urine sample for doping control purposes whenever called upon by a properly authorized Olympic official.

“If it became obvious that certain countries were not allowing in testers, the point is made anyway.”

On the subject of South Africa, Gold thinks the republic’s exclusion from the Olympic Games, and the international community, penalizes no one but South African athletes.

“I would allow South African sportsmen back in because there is no point in excluding people like that. You are penalizing them, not their government,” he said. “I abhor apartheid in any shape or form, but if we accept that South African sport has been light years ahead of its government in terms of integration I would look upon each of the sports individually.

“Where there has been full integration, bring it (the sport) in. And where there has not been keep it out until it is fully multi-racial.

“We should not put South African sport into a situation where its own right wing can say to its own governing body, ‘You did everything the world federation asked you to do. You bent down and licked their boots and what are they doing? They still kick you in the teeth, so why bother.’