Running Scared: How Athletics Lost Its Innocence

Dope scandals, cash rows, fixed events and rigged ballots: athletics is in crisis. Yet over the past two decades, athletics has also become Britain's most successful sport. Around the tracks of the world, Coe and Ovett, Christie and Jackson, Whitbread and Gunnell have all contributed to that success. But what has been the human cost?
Running Scared gives the inside track on the first ten years of professional athletics. The book investigates the events which contributed to the suicide of a sports journalist; the complex way some televised races are fixed to ensure the required result, with some athletes even being paid to lose races. The authors also reveal the inside deals of the athletics Grand Prix, of big city marathons and the running-shoe business. They tell of under-the-counter payments made by officials to break old-style amateur rules and they expose the twenty-year sham of drugs cover-ups organised by officials in Britain and abroad.
With access to previously unpublished, confidential documents, Running Scared shows how the sport of Chariots of Fire has become more like the sport of Chariots of Fear.