World Athletics Championships: When the feel-good stories are lost, the most human sport becomes soulless

The pinnacle of the athletics calendar has become a tale of empty seats, allegations of doping and corruption, and the symbol of a sport where joy is often overshadowed

If you don’t regularly watch athletics, you probably won’t have noticed the 4’11” 23-year-old standing in an unusually baggy vest beside Olympic champion Elaine Thompson in the 100m heats. After all, Dutee Chand only finished 37th overall, has no long-term brand endorsements and supplements her income by working at a mining company.

In fact, even on the Sunday when Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce returned from giving birth to reclaim her status as the fastest woman in the world and Allyson Felix surpassed Usain Bolt to become the most decorated world champion in history – less than a year after undergoing an emergency C-section – they weren’t the first things you noticed. Instead, of course, it was the plethora of empty seats, the angry air-conditioning units and overcompensating strobe light show. A World Athletics Championships in Doha dominated in large part by the people who weren’t actually present.

The line between castigating the IAAF’s decision to take their premier event to Qatar without detracting from the athletes who are its lifeblood remains inescapably thin. The disheartening ad-lib as Denise Lewis looked out over Khalifa Stadium, just minutes after Dina Asher-Smith had broken Britain’s 100m record, and admitted the “governing body has let our athletes down massively”. The BBC team’s awkwardly sympathetic attempts to applaud the sprinter from the commentary box to counter the eerie seance surrounding the track. What should be the pinnacle of the athletics calendar has become something disturbingly soulless, where achievements have to be amended by caveat and a sense of humanity feels long lost to the pursuit of milliseconds.

When sport hits a nadir as rectal as this, it’s easy to highlight the insidiousness which bleeds from the top. On the opening day of the championships, The Guardian revealed that $4.5m was allegedly paid into the offshore bank account of the son of disgraced former IAAF president Lamine Diack just hours before Doha received the winning number of votes to host the event. Diack, who is currently under house arrest, is also alleged to have taken a bribe relating to the 2016 Olympic bid as well as concealing positive tests of Russian athletes. The man who, lest we forget, was described by his successor, Sebastian Coe, as a “spiritual leader”.

Of course, at the time, there was no infrastructure for such an event. So, upon the IAAF’s decision to award these championships to Doha, the 40,000-seater Khalifa Stadium was built by thousands of migrant workers brought to the country from Africa before being left “destitute, needing food aid to survive” and returning home to their families “penniless”, according to Amnesty. It was many of those remaining workers who largely filled the front rows on Sunday evening and left long before the Ivory Coast’s Marie-Josée Ta Lou crossed the line in third at 11:30pm local time.

Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce wins the women’s 100m in front of an empty crowd in Doha (PA)

But while it’s easy to point the fingers at flagrant governing bodies, athletics has never been a sport corrupted solely from the top-down. We have already seen the likes of football, golf and Formula One traipse to the Middle East in search of cash injections and return swiftly to business as usual. Yet, the malady about this week feels lasting, and the wider problem within athletics is that tales of ambiguity and deception can be found at every level in almost every corner.

The so-called new face of the sport, Christian Coleman, followed his 100m victory by showing remorseless indignation to those questioning his missing three drugs tests in the past 18 months. Justin Gatlin, who has served two separate doping bans – and yet was ardently defended by Usain Bolt when winning this competition two years ago – finished second with a time of 9.89s. The American is 37 years old.

Even many of those feel-good stories, such as Sifan Hassan, who left Ethiopia for the Netherlands as a refugee aged 15, can be complex. In the 10,000m final, Hassan ran the second 5000m and final 1500m in times capable of winning gold in both those individual events. Forty-eight hours later, her coach, Alberto Salazar, was banned for four years by USADA for “possessing and trafficking a banned performance-enhancing substance and administering or attempting to administer a prohibited method to multiple athletes” as well as allegedly attempting to tamper with evidence – Hassan has never been accused of doping and Salazar intends to appeal USADA’s decision.

Siffan Hassan celebrates after winning the women’s 10,000m (EPA)

As Anzhelika Sidorova admitted she felt “uncomfortable” on the podium, serenaded by the IAAF anthem in the proud colours of the Authorised Neutral Athletes, it was impossible to avoid the loss of feeling and almost mechanical absence of hope that resonates within athletics. Sidorova cleared 4.95m, the best jump of her career, and took gold – her greatest achievement. When she returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow, her bag was stuffed full of boxes of whipped cream she’d bought in Doha as a reward.

They are the little human anecdotes that make athletics feel so alive. The fair yet still so supernatural athletes who keep us watching. The flecks of light in a shrouded sport, whose lives can be distilled down to a single uncelebrated heat in Doha.

Dutee Chand wandered to the side of the track. After 11.48s, her time was over.

What you wouldn’t know is that Chand was born into a family of weavers living below the poverty line in rural India; that she was forced to withdraw from the Commonwealth Games in 2014 and suspended from competition for two years due to a hyperandrogenism ruling labelled “an affront to her privacy and human rights”, or that she was “disowned” by her village after becoming India’s first athlete to speak publicly about being in a same-sex relationship. But you can’t write that in a record book.