Bolt remains beacon of hope: Sports medicine expert

Kingston (Jamaica), Aug 6 (IANS/CMC) Six-time Olympic sprint champion Usain Bolt remains a beacon of hope in a sport rocked by elite athletes testing positive for banned substances, a leading sports medicine specialist in Jamaica has said.

Paul Wright says Jamaica would suffer from infinite distress should Bolt's name fall on the wrong side of any drug test.

"Usain Bolt has been tested more often, I think, than all of the athletes in Jamaica, and he is well aware of his importance to the sport," declared Wright, the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission (JADCo) doping control officer.

"I remember, and this is a quote from Usain, 'if I test positive, the whole Jamaica dead' and that is true."

Jamaica's sprint queen Veronica Campbell Brown, former 100-metre world record holder Asafa Powell, and Beijing Olympics silver medallist Sherone Simpson are among those who recently returned adverse analytical findings. All three are seeking to prove their innocence.

"As I told another interviewer, I said I would drop down dead. There is so much on it and he is well aware of his responsibilities," Wright said while addressing a function in Kingston.

Wright is warning athletes, some of whom he believes are taking undetectable performance-enhancing drugs, that they will be caught.

"We are going to catch everybody.We all know that there are chemists who change around these steroids. All you have to do is change one of the wings of these steroids, it will have the same effect and it's undetectable," Wright explained.

"If you are going to detect that in somebody's urine, the computer has to recognise it and that is where you have to feed standards into the computer that the computer can recognise. If there isn't a standard, it can't recognize."

--IANS/CMC

bs/dg