THE WORLD Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) intends to introduce electronic passports for athletes. WADA says that by using their passports, athletes will be able to keep drugs-testing agencies aware of their whereabouts at all times.

Two successful pilot schemes have already been conducted in Australia and Canada. WADA member Johann Kos expects an international move next summer. Athletes will be invited to volunteer, but if not enough do, it could be made mandatory.

"The biggest problem with drugs testing is knowing where the athlete is at any particular time," said Kos, a former Norwegian speed-skater who represents the International Olympics Committee on WADA. "The electronic passport would permit the athlete to be available for out-of-competition testing at all times. But as well as helping drugs-testers, it will also help athletes to prove they are clean."

WADA will meet in Oslo next month, when the issue of electronic passports will be on the agenda. Since out-of-competition testing was introduced in the late eighties, many athletes have continually outmanoeuvred the testers, some believe deliberately.

They move around the world, often seeking warm-weather training, but there has long been the suspicion that some simply want to be beyond the reach of the drugs-testers.

It is also envisaged that the electronic passports would be used to record dates, locations and results of all tests.

"We also have to get rid of this 'rule of confidentiality'," Kos said. "This is a rule that protects cheats when we should be protecting the clean."

US Track and Field and UK Athletics have both embraced the confidentiality rule and both have been accused of covering up positive test results.

Kos also believes there has to be a harmonisation of doping rules across sports and nations, better monitoring of laboratories, an independent body to supervise testing, a quicker processing of positive cases and recognition of the Court of Arbitration for Sport as the court of appeal.

"There is a perception out there that you have to use drugs to be a gold medallist in the Olympic Games," he said. "In Sydney we have fought drugs like never before and we intend to go on from here."

DAVID WALSH
Sunday Times

Redgrave: final honour

Steve Redgrave has been handed the final honour of the Sydney Olympics when he was confirmed as Britain’s flag bearer in tomorrow’s closing ceremony.

Redgrave, who claimed a rowing gold medal for the fifth successive Games in the men’s coxless four, said it would be "a great honour" to lead the British team around Stadium Australia. Redgrave was Britain’s flag bearer at the opening ceremony for Barcelona in 1992 and at Atlanta four years ago and coxless four team-mate Matthew Pinsent had the honour of being flag bearer for the opening ceremony in Sydney.

Redgrave said: "I feel a bit guilty because rowing seems to have monopolised the opening and closing ceremonies but it will finish my Olympics off in a very special way."

Redgrave has said he will keep rowing internationally but has not yet revealed whether he will attempt a sixth successive Games gold in Athens in 2004. But being the flag bearer tomorrow night after winning an historic fifth gold medal in Sydney - making him the most successful Olympian in endurance sports - would be an impressive way to bow out of Olympic action.

Simon Clegg, the British Olympic Association Chef de Mission, revealed that team managers within Team GB had been unanimous in chosing Redgrave to be flag bearer. A smiling Redgrave, tongue in cheek, said: "They (the BOA) are making it very difficult for me to carry on. When Princess Anne presented me with the gold medal she said, ‘this is the second gold medal I’ve given you - I don’t want to see a third’. I’ve still made no statement on what my career will entail from now on. I’ll race in a few weeks’ time (in a sprint challenge) and assess it after that."

PETER WATTS
Sunday Times

Advance Australia fair: Cathy Freeman's victory in the women's 400m was a symbol of the Games in Sydney

The Sydney Olympics will be remembered for positives that have nothing to do with the results of drug tests. Long after the world has only a fading memory of the nandrolone-nourished bulk of C J Hunter, and of the well-timed tears that flowed as the mountain of suspicion brought forth a squeaking mouse of denial, there will be clear pictures in countless minds of what was done at these Games by Cathy Freeman, Steven Redgrave, Ian Thorpe and many others who made us feel happy and privileged to be members of the same species.

Fairness demands that Marion Jones be included in that honours list, for it must require more than the mere fact of her marriage to Hunter to invalidate the achievements of a 24-year-old who may be the most talented of all the nearly 11,000 athletes assembled here. Jones herself had a serious brush with the anti-doping authorities when she was a teenager but it is generally accepted that her failure to take a urine test was due to a breakdown in communications. It is the condemnation of Hunter, the world shot- put champion who is not only her husband but her coach, that has cast a huge, cold shadow of doubt over her historic feats on the track.

Speculation surrounding the ill-matched pair was bound to be intensified by the presence at Hunter's press conference last week of Johnnie Cochran, a "family friend" best known for spearheading the notoriously successful defence of O J Simpson on grisly murder charges. If Cochran should decide to intervene professionally, his forensic skills may work to the benefit of the disgraced shot putter but the lawyer's involvement will do nothing to dispel the cloud of public uncertainty that has settled over Jones. Sadly, there are now questions attached to her accomplishments, and they may never go away.

But the moral implications of branding her unjustly are horrifying. When cynicism becomes a reflex we are all losers. Though we are told it is naïve to regard the grace, beauty and power of Jones's performances as entirely a gift of nature, you don't have to be a simpleton to want to cling to the dream of innocence, at least until her doubters come up with something more persuasive than the concept of guilt by association. She looked as if she could have won the women's 100m and 200m finals while arranging a hairdresser's appointment on her mobile phone, and it would be depressing in the extreme to have to acknowledge that a share of the credit for her apparently effortless superiority belonged to the chemists.

All the signs suggest that she is quite simply an athlete of a different calibre from those who trailed in behind her. If anybody gained an advantage from any hidden contribution the pharmaceutical industry made to the outcome of the sprint finals, it was surely not Jones. That inference plainly does not affect the ethical issues implicit in the debate about the use of drugs in sport but it does reinforce our obligation to respect her basic right to be presumed innocent until hard evidence tells us she is not.

The superwoman of American athletics may have moved more gracefully than any other runner at the Games but nobody was as gracefully moving as Cathy Freeman. There is nothing patronising or mawkish about recognising the 27-year-old Aboriginal runner as the symbolic heroine of Sydney 2000. Bold and sensible political thinking presented her with the dramatic role of carrying the Olympic torch the last few yards to the cauldron high on the edge of Stadium Australia, but it was what she achieved subsequently on the track that justified the tide of extraordinarily pure emotions she stirred.

A nation's longing had seemed to load an impossible burden on to her back, but it turned out to be a booster rocket as she swept clear in the 400m final for a victory whose golden glow reminded us of how unbearable defeat would have been. It is hard to believe that any other athlete in history ever had to cope with a fiercer concentration of expectations than was borne in on Freeman last Monday night. By handling it with such courage and panache, she demonstrated the most worthwhile attribute sport possesses, the capacity to transmute a personal triumph into a cause for communal or even universal joy.

Her unique impact has been produced not only by her background and her abilities but by the extent to which her personality suits her destiny. "Something like this happening to a little girl like me," she said after winning her gold, and there was nothing false about the words or the expression of awe on her wonderfully sensitive face. But the little girl is also a mature, strong woman, one whose determination to shape her life according to an independent agenda has not prevented her from speaking out forcefully against the wrongs that continue to be inflicted on indigenous Australians.

When the euphoria created by her Olympic deeds has subsided, all the familiar problems of her people will still be out there: the bad housing and inferior education, the deaths in custody and calamitous suicide rates, the dearth of opportunities for advancement - and hanging over everything, the stubborn reluctance of Prime Minister John Howard and his government to deliver the national apology that the Aboriginal population see as a prerequisite of genuine progress. None of those grievances will diminish overnight because a black woman enraptured her country by winning a foot race. However, having taken heartfelt pride in Freeman as one of their own, the white majority can hardly marginalise her when the big show has closed. The hosts have brought so much generosity of spirit to the staging of these Olympics - with seemingly every citizen exhibiting a warm commitment to making the rest of the human race welcome in this spectacular and vibrant city - that it should not be romantic folly to hope that one of the residual benefits will be an increased enthusiasm for fostering unity among Australians.

Another legitimate hope is that the example set by Sydney 2000 will reinvigorate the Olympics, which came here sorely in need of being spiritually uplifted. Everything said and written in praise of how brilliantly the Australians have succeeded in restoring an atmosphere of festival to the Games is fully deserved.

They did, admittedly, have the advantage of knowing that whatever they offered would be an improvement on the wearisome shambles of four years ago.

But the scale of the contrast has been breathtaking. Sydney after Atlanta is like Krug after flat Coca-Cola.

The past three weeks have been a heady ride (not least for the gold-amassing British) and it has been made all the more enjoyable by the hosts' ability to deliver us where we wanted to be. A splendid transport system is probably the most prominent proof that Australian hospitality has been buttressed by formidable powers of organisation.

Obviously, the efficiency of the Games must always count for less than their ethos and the most encouraging omen of all in Sydney has come from the increased seriousness and vigour applied to the rooting-out of drug cheats. The unprecedented rate at which offenders have been unmasked here and the harsh international reaction to the refusal of the governing body of American athletics to disclose the names of a substantial number of their athletes who tested positive in the months preceding the Olympics clearly indicate, not before time, that attitudes are hardening within the IOC.

Almost as significant were heavy comments unloaded by two IOC vice-presidents who are conspicuous contenders to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch when the Spaniard steps down shortly from the presidency. Dick Pound, a Canadian lawyer, accused the US track and field authorities of being in "a state of denial" over their doping problems and Jacques Rogge, the Belgian orthopaedic surgeon who is hotly tipped to take over from Samaranch, dumped scorn on C J Hunter's insistence that he registered 1,000 times the permitted limit for the steroid nandrolone because he had been taking a nutritional supplement. "The only way to have such high levels is either by injection or by taking pills," said the doctor.

The appointment of Rogge as president would engender optimism that stronger, more enlightened policies could soon emerge in the Olympic movement. A former world champion yachtsman who competed at the Games of 1968, 1972 and 1976, he is 58 and could therefore be considered young blood by IOC standards. He would be expected to support the moves already discernible in the IOC towards the introduction of lifetime bans from the Olympics for athletes convicted of doping. To the British Olympic Association's credit, they have been prepared to hand down such sentences since 1988.

Being deprived of involvement in Sydney 2000 would have been severe punishment indeed - even for a spectator. These have been the Games of a lifetime, certainly of mine.

HUGH MCILVANNEY
Sunday Times