Doctor Knows: A start, but no fix

When Luvo Manyonga soared to a jump of 8.65m - the longest in eight years - earlier this year in Potchefstroom, he put himself just outside the top 10 long-jumpers of all time.

The performance had the benefit of altitude, but Manyonga followed it up with 8.61m in Shanghai on Saturday to confirm his place as the world's No1 long-jumper.

He will now have his sights on the world record, and that may be either 30cm away (a huge challenge), or only 9cm away (much more attainable).

The reason for the difference is a proposal three weeks ago to "recalibrate" the world records by removing all times and marks set prior to 2005.

If accepted, Mike Powell's world record of 8.95m (set in 1991) would be replaced by an 8.74m jump by Dwight Phillips in 2009, putting Manyonga the length of your smartphone away from being South Africa's second world record-holder.

The proposed change is intended to restore credibility to track and field and, if you look at the world record lists, you'll understand why. The current records are like a fossil record of historical failed and non-existent anti-doping efforts and the justification for a 2005 cut-off is because that year, in theory, is when anti-doping efforts reached a point of trustworthiness.

Before that, anti-doping was like trying to shoot a fly in an airport hangar with the lights off - sometimes it got lucky but, mostly, athletes did as they pleased.

See those records in the sprint and throwing events from the early to mid-1980s, especially among women?

They were almost certainly achieved with the benefit of anabolic steroids, which weren't tested for out of competition until 1987.

That, plus political upheavals, tells you why eastern European women, in particular, are so prominent in the record books before about 1988, when better testing was eventually introduced.

This slowed down the sprinters and "weakened" the power athletes, whose performances fell away by 10% immediately.

See those endurance records of the 1990s and early 2000s? Those likely tell you about EPO (erythropoiten) and blood doping, which we know were widely used in sports like cycling and running because there was no test for EPO until 2000, and even then, it was rudimentary.

It was only in 2006 that testing improved enough to finally dent this doping practice but not before it became impossible to trust any cyclist winning the Tour de France and any runner setting world records in this period.

So the idea that we reset the record books holds some appeal as a way to start anew, to wipe clean a slate we know was dirty. That's the positive aspect of the proposal.

The negative is twofold. Firstly, not every world record performance is definitely doped. I have grave doubts about pretty much all of them but, by definition, there was no testing, so you can't prove (or disprove) it! The result may be "collateral damage" - athletes whose world records will be erased despite being clean.

Perhaps Powell's afore-mentioned long jump record is legitimate, who knows?

The second problem is conceptual. By drawing this line in 2005, accepting previously failed anti-doping efforts, authorities are implying that performances could now be trusted - as though a watershed had been reached.

Certainly, anti-doping today is better than it was before. A lot better. But it's not yet at a place where trust and integrity can be guaranteed. For reasons I've written about before, there is reason to doubt current performances almost as much as there is to doubt those in the past.

The act of cleaning the slate, then, is symbolic at a time that it can't really be justified. It's like going outside and washing your car in the middle of a dust storm. Cleaning the slate only works if the thing that dirtied it has been removed, and doping in sport hasn't.

Still, it's a step in the right direction, I think, and we shouldn't make good the enemy of perfect. But if this is implied as perfect (as some have done), it must be resisted, lest the anti-doping fight be assumed to have been won.