A travesty of justice

Published on Thursday 17 October 2002 01:00

Scotland’s Olympic skier Alain Baxter has been cleared of cheating. He can now hold his head up high, secure in the knowledge that his reputation as one of our country’s top athletes has finally been restored.

But his bronze medal - the first Olympic award Britain has ever won for skiing - will not be.

The International Olympic Committee’s Court of Arbitration has accepted that Baxter "did not intend to obtain a competitive advantage" when he unwittingly used a Vicks nasal spray containing the chemical methamphetamine at the games in Salt Lake City, Utah, earlier this year.

Baxter had regularly used what he thought was exactly the same product in Britain, where it does not contain the chemical. It was an easy mistake to make.

But the IOC has bluntly refused to overturn the Olympic medal disqualification which was imposed after Baxter’s positive drugs test and return his bronze medal. Incredibly, new doping rules will be in place next year, a clear recognition of the scientific weaknesses of the current system of testing.

This is a travesty of justice for a young athlete, who, at the peak of his fitness, managed to fairly achieve what no British athlete had done before him.

Even when refusing to give him back the medal he so richly deserves, the IOC Court of Arbitration has had the gall to say it was "not without sympathy for Mr Baxter, who appears to be a sincere and honest man."

Such words of sympathy will be cold comfort to Baxter, who has endured eight months of uncertainty and anguish, battling to save his sporting career.

The members of the IOC court deserve to be roundly condemned for their self-serving decision to endorse the mindless bureaucracy which nullified Baxter’s moment of sporting glory.

The disqualification will even hamper his chances in next month’s World Cup - ironically in Salt Lake City - because he will not be allowed to enter the top 20 with the points from winning the Olympic bronze.

It is only to be hoped that Baxter can overcome this obstacle with the same courage he has shown in the past eight months. That has been truly a heroic performance.

Cobbled together

ONCE the predicted cost had reached 308.8 million, it is entirely laudable that the MSPs overseeing the new Scottish Parliament building are finally, somewhat belatedly, looking at cutting costs.

As risible at it might seem now, the original projections were that the building could be delivered for as little as 40 million.

One of the MSPs’ intentions was to cut a substantial 430,000 off the cost of resurfacing the road at Horse Wynd outside Holyrood Palace by using tarmac instead of cobblestones.

Now, however, the city council insists that the MSPs stick to the original plan, pointing out that the parliament is at the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, and recognised as a World Heritage Site.

As a result, Horse Wynd will have to remain closed for nine months to allow the setts to be put in place, and the savings will not be made.

Surely enough money has been spent on the project without further unnecessary expenditure, and does the public really need this level of disruption?

The council’s planning convener Bob Cairns argued that the tarmac would have been "suburban" and "inappropriate".

So why then, if cobblestones are so crucial to the character of the area, was the original road surface at Horse Wynd made from tarmac?