Pound revelations may at last take a weight off all our minds

Damn you, Dick Pound. You very nearly ruined my enjoyment of watching Britain’s weightlifters in the World Championships. Damn you, Dick Pound, not only for your Wada report into doping in athletics, but for your promise last week in the pages of The Independent that the secondary part of the investigation would blow wide open even more scandal. It made me question every world record, every bulging thigh – and especially every Russian who stepped on to the platform that night.

I had initially turned on Eurosport in the wee small hours of Thursday morning to watch the two Britons, Zoe Smith and Rebekah Tiler, lift massive weights in Houston.

And I wasn’t disappointed. From Smith’s partially successful attempts to stop beaming as she walked out with the rest of the competitors in the A group – the cream of the under-63kg weight division – to Tiler’s unfussy strides to the bar, where she barely paused before seemingly effortlessly hoisting close to twice her bodyweight above her head, the pair were great to watch.

The commentators, Michaela Breeze and David Goldstrom, were just on the right side of sardonic – presumably in the full knowledge that this sport is a bit of a novelty to most of us – and Breeze was the epitome of graciousness when Smith broke two of her British records, the clean and jerk and the total. “I’ll be the first to congratulate her,” she said before Smith’s first lift. And when she lifted 124kg in the clean and jerk, thus breaking the record, Breeze exclaimed: “Fantastic!”

There was further feel-good factor when Smith failed in her attempt to lift 128kg by pressing out the bar from a bent elbow to a straight one. She dumped the weight down and stood on the platform in mock pleading, with a rueful grin, to the judges to allow the lift. It was a nice moment and in stark contrast to the po-faced scowls of many of the competitors.

And there were many grimaces to come after the Britons had left the platform. The utterances of “astounding” and “unbelievable” appeared to weigh heavily – if you’ll pardon the pun – with every jaw-dropping lift from China’s Deng Wei or Russia’s Tima Turieva, who finished first and second respectively. Deng broke the clean and jerk world record – lifting an unfathomable 146kg – and celebrated, if you could call it that, with little more than what the right-wing press may call a Jeremy Corbyn-sized bow.

We had no reason to believe the pair weren’t lifting clean, but since Pound’s revelations, we’ve become a little more jaded; we now know that things are not always what they seem – and when things seem unbelievable, they sometimes are.

It’s probably a good thing, though. Especially if you are Smith or Tiler, two lifters with bright futures ahead of them. With a level playing-field, we may even be talking medals come Tokyo 2020. So thank you, Dick Pound.