EILIDH CHILD has issued a warning to Scotland's new generation of athletes not to run the gauntlet of popping pills and risk becoming unwitting victims of the chase to drive drug cheats from the sport.
The European champion, 29, continues her build-up to next month's world championships trials with a run over 400m hurdles in tonight's Diamond League meeting in Rome. However, harsh lessons on the risks of seeking margin gains can be easily found from her former training partner Rhys Williams who is now slowly making his way back from a ban for ingesting contaminated supplements. Although there has been some sympathy for the Welshman's plight, it is proof of where the buck ultimately stops if the tests throw up a positive result.
"With supplements, they're not 100 per cent safe," Child declares. "Pas, who I use, are owned by Darren Campbell so we chatted to him and he explained the procedures they have to make sure everything is batch tested, three or four times. You get a certificate with the tests and the batch numbers, when and where it happened. And that's what you have to do, you need to know that testing info. Companies can say they've done it, but unless you have a certificate, you don't know for sure."
With online assistance, and an advisory service at UK Athletes headed by their in-house chemist David Walsh, excuses are pointless, the Scot adds. Walsh's lectures on the potential dangers, and pitfalls, are frank and fulsome. "It puts the fear into you when you talk about it like that but it's the best thing. You need to know or you can get caught out. Because if there's something in your system you can't account for, it's your responsibility."
Fellow Scot Laura Muir faces Dutch rival Sifan Hassan and in-form American Jenny Simpson over 1500m in Rome with Child pitted against the USA's Lashinda Demus as she bids to ease back into the kind of form that saw her finish second in the 2014 Diamond Race standings to break into the sport's A-list.
"It was interesting," she admits. "People in the event maybe knew me. But finishing high in the Diamond League is a big thing in athletics. It's brought more notice on me but that's where you want to be. I see that as a positive. If they know who I am, it's because I'm running well."
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