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Comment: Get Christie's hands off torch
Evening Standard Comment22.02.08
For the Mayor to invite Linford Christie, a man banned for life from the Olympics for drug use, to carry the Olympic torch, is careless at best and, at worst, evidence of flagrant disregard for the spirit of sport.
It could not have come at a worse time for British athletics, just as Dwain Chambers, a runner also barred from Olympic competition for drug use, has kept his place in the British team for the World Indoor Championships. The invitation to Mr Christie, once a great athlete but now disgraced, must be withdrawn.
Mr Christie was invited by the Mayor last year to join the 80-man team to carry the torch in London as part of its journey round the world to Beijing's opening ceremony on August 8. Locog, the London organising committee, has distanced itself from the invitation, while shadow Sports Minister Hugh Robertson said the invitation sent out the wrong message about the way drug cheats should be treated.
Mr Christie is being asked to run 250 metres in the ceremony, as though he was a model contestant rather than a disgraced steroid abuser who received a two-year ban from sprinting in 1999, leading to a lifetime ban from the Olympics. It is not as though Britain, with 30 medals at the Athens Games alone, is short of top sporting figures who could form part of the torch-bearing chain.
The International Olympic Committee has no power of veto over invitations of this kind, so it is up to the Mayor to accept that the offer of participation was wholly inappropriate and to withdraw it. Britain must be seen to take a tough line with drugs cheats as our own Olympics, in 2012, draws closer. And at a time when police are investigating six organisations for fraud over City Hall grants and a probe by the District Auditor is under way, the Mayor cannot afford to be cavalier in matters of ethics.
