July 11, 2008

Owen Slot

Vote: should we scrap every world record and start again?

With curious symmetry, Dwain Chambers's likely court appearance on Wednesday will fall on the 20th anniversary of the day that Florence Griffith-Joyner set a women's 100 metres world record that may never be broken. In which case, he might like to bear two names in mind.

One is Mary Ruth, the daughter of Griffith-Joyner, who knows what it is like to wake up in the morning at the age of 7 and find that your mother has died in the night. Ten years and two months after her mother set the record, she died in her bed of what the coroner eventually declared to be asphyxia triggered by a seizure. Mary Ruth was sleeping in an adjoining room. But whatever the coroner may have written on the death certificate, Mary Ruth should by now know what was written elsewhere. Either that, or the day she Googles her mother's name will be a painful one.

In fact, the most illegal aspect of Griffith-Joyner's 100 metres that record-breaking day in the 1988 United States Olympic trials in Indianapolis was probably...