BEIJING, Aug 13: Athletics is a sport in crisis and desperately needs new heroes to emerge from the Olympic Games after the relentless doping assault that has virtually destroyed its credibility.

John Fahey, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, warned last week that fans would desert athletics for good if doping could not be stamped out.

“Otherwise we are morally bankrupt and we are saying to our kids, ‘If you want to succeed, fill yourself up with pills, otherwise you can’t,” he said.

“If we do not, then part of the world that we have known for all our lives is going to leave us.”

Fahey identified the 100 metres, a race plagued by doping since Ben Johnson’s spectacular fall from grace 20 years ago, as key to restoring belief.

With Athens 2004 champion Justin Gatlin joining a long list of banned dopers and with 2000 women’s champion Marion Jones jailed, public confidence in the blue riband event is at rock bottom.

As all-conquering swimmer Michael Phelps hogs the Olympic limelight, Lamine Diack, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), agreed that his sport urgently needed to find some new heroes.

“Yes, we do and we have some great performers, some young athletes who can do something exceptional,” Diack said on Tuesday.” We need to show what a wonderful sport athletics is.”

Earlier this year the IAAF announced that it had employed a branding agency to work on enhancing the sport’s image and officials have been worried for years about its position as the centrepiece of the Olympics.

Double Olympic 1,500 metres champion Seb Coe, an IAAF vice-president and head of the London 2012 Games, has been long-warned that action is needed.

Five years ago he helped launch a “search for heroes” campaign, lamenting that Hicham El Guerrouj was possibly the best middle-distance runner of all time but was unknown on the school playgrounds of Europe and America.

Still worried now, Coe said that athletics needed re-energizing all over the world.

“[We need] to capture the imagination of those who follow the sport and to reach out to the next generation,” he said.

Despite being the sport’s dominant country, the United States has always struggled to find a domestic audience and its status remains very much second-tier – and falling. Double world sprint champion Tyson Gay and one of the biggest draws in Beijing expressed astonishment this week that National Basketball Association MVP Kobe Bryant recognised him in the Olympic athletes’ village.

It is not all doom, however, as Gay’s 100 metres clash with Usain Bolt and Asafa Powell should be enough to electrify the masses and 110 metres hurdler Liu Xiang is a hero in China.

But it seems the sport’s future is less dependent on how fast they run, than how quickly they are cleared by doping control.

—Reuters