Drugs cheats - Olympic movement is tarnished
He failed an out-of-competition drugs test in Switzerland three weeks ago, and he has now admitted his guilt.
There may be protestations of shock, but nobody should really be surprised that any athlete would be caught using performance-enhancing drugs in the light of all the abuses that have been in uncovered recent years.
Some of the most successful athletes - the icons of the sport - have been exposed as having used such drugs.
In 1988, Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal for the 100 metres after testing positive for a banned substance at the Seoul Olympics, but the three athletes who were subsequently awarded the medals for that race all later tested positive. Carl Lewis, who was awarded that gold medal, actually failed three drug tests during the American Olympic Trials in 1988, but the US Olympic Committee covered this up.
More than a 100 other positive tests were covered up involving American Olympic athletes from 1988 to 2000.
While the Americans loudly denounced the violations by Eastern Bloc countries, they hypocritically facilitated and covered up the same kind of behaviour themselves.
Cathal Lombard contends that drug abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the sport.
He attributes his own exposure to a lack of professional back-up to advise him on how to avoid detection.
Prior to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, this kind of drug abuse was conducted at such a sophisticated professional level that many of the athletes did not know they were actually using banned drugs.
They just took the drugs and vitamins that they were given by coaches, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Some of the finest athletes of the era are now plagued by health problems as a result of using drugs that damaged their bodies. They were really little more than guinea pigs in a kind of Orwellian experiment.
The Chinese briefly produced a crop of long-distance women runners with the help of an East German coach.
They took the world by storm in 1993 but vanished just as quickly as more sophisticated drug-testing techniques came on stream. Sonia O'Sullivan was a victim of their success.
But we cannot afford to get carried away on this issue, however, as our most successful Olympian, Michelle Smith, subsequently became embroiled in a scandal over a banned substance. It is, of course, a terrible disappointment that Cathal Lombard has been exposed as a cheat, but it is at least refreshing that he had both the integrity to apologise to those he let down and the guts to admit his responsibility without any of the false protestations of wounded innocence of so many of the others who have been exposed.
All too often, the role models of more recent years are cheats who beat the system, sometimes with the help of the system itself. As a result, the whole Olympic movement has been seriously tarnished, and the drugs issue threatens its continued viability.
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