Today is the day! It comes not a 0.001 too soon.

At last, the girls of The Last Gold, swimmers who battled to the only gold medal won by women of the West in the face of East Germany’s doping-fuelled dominance at the height of the Cold War of sport enter the International Hall of Fame as the first relay to be inducted as a quartet. 

There are excellent reasons to celebrate the achievements of Shirley Babshoff, Wendy Boglioli, Jill Sterkel and Kim Peyton at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games. On that score, it's a great day. 

But let it not blind us to the truth as the applause rings out in Fort Lauderdale. Let this day be a reminder of some hard home truths about the generations of women harmed because generations of governors and those who felt unable to speak truth to power because they valued going along to get along more than integrity and athlete welfare.

One obvious question: how could it possibly have taken so long - and what has yet to be called for, let alone done, by the governors, the Hall, the politicians, promoters, kit makers and others all too silent down the years, among them folk wearing multiple hats in a lifetime spent capitalising on their proximity to Olympic athletes?

And the bigger one: what's to be done about it and does swimming have leaders capable of embracing long-overdue integrity, truth and reconciliation?

Six Hard Truths from a Sea of Sorrows

• GDR girls as young as 11 were doped with testosterone because the scientists and other architects of State Research Plan 14:25 worked out in the 1960s that if you gave girls a small amount of the male hormone that boys are flushed with at puberty on the way to becoming men, you build an invisible force of female athletes in a variety of sport, swimming included; and even less gifted swimmers will be able to pick up waves of silvers and bronzes through because mediocrity in the form of poor technique and other factors can be compensated for by brute force good enough to beat most of the rest of the world’s women in a number of disciplines, aquatic and otherwise.
• The doping affected men, too, but the impact was most savagely seen among women, for obvious biological reasons. State Plan 14:25 - which created victims on both sides of the political divide, the bulk of them teenage girls - was, for the most part (though not exclusively) planned and delivered by men ... and was highly misogynistic. 
• Generations of GDR athletes saw their long-term health compromised (at best) in return for promoting communism as “ambassadors in track suits” in an Olympic realm that claimed to be apolitical. 
• Some received compensation from the German Government after the token convictions (some criminal) of some of those responsible. They were the kind of cases that would have resulted in multi-million-dollar suits in the United States. In Germany, it has long since been illegal to give doping or any medication that is not medically required to anyone under-age.  Those compensated, in three big tranches since the trials, included a minority of folk who found the courage to come forward and testify against their abusers, including some who felt they had nothing to lose because the abuse had already cost them so dearly in the depths of sorrows stretching to the birth of disabled children, the inability to have children at all, a lifetime of pain and pills, the need to have sex-change operations and much else that sits on a list of "things people don't ever introduce their children to sport for nor expect to be a part of sport".
• On the side of those beaten into submission and robbed of their rightful rewards and status in life as high achievers in Olympic sports, athletes, parents, coaches and others have died waiting to see justice done: half a century is an inordinate, indecent and, frankly, shameful amount of time to have passed without a truth and reconciliation process or anything remotely close to that since the sporting crime of the 20th century unfolded with a vengeance in the 1970s (in some sports, it got underway in the Sixties).
• The Hall of Fame opted to honour Craig Beardsley because he missed the 1980 Olympics due to a boycott led by his own President and country - and they did so before honouring and recognising generations of women thumped into submission by cheating, including those who did race in Moscow and should have long ago been recognised for the golds, silvers, bronzes and places in finals they have long deserved to claim as achievements during their sports careers.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favour of a wing of the Hall that recognises a World-record holder robbed of the chance to race for the Olympic gold he'd been working for. It's not Craig's fault and I, for one, would not begrudge him his induction. 

However, yet again, the token induction among the very many who might also have made it to the Hall in retrospective action acknowledging wrongs, righting injustice to the extent it can be righted was ... one man. 

At least Craig was alive to see the day. His induction reminds us of another case of one man - Jim Thorpe - benefitting from retrospective action when generations of women are told the harm done to them is not worth fighting for. 

Where there have been attempts to heal wounds inflicted long ago from eras in which the politics of state of Olympic governance plundered the good nature and name of sport and used athletes like pawns in a Game of Thrones, we must go through the male changing room to get to it. 

And as we saw in female boxing bouts for gold and silver in Paris this year, biological males are still being given the upper hand over females for the want of a simple, stress-free, rapid sex test that a majority of women athletes support but the IOC refuses to use as a fundamental part of its responsibility to deliver fair and safe play.   

I make make no apologies for extending that thought on discrimination to national status: the Hall may be 'international' but its bias extends beyond "male" to "American", undeniable the number of USA relay swimmers who make the selection cut down the years while solo Olympic champions from elsewhere in the world wait and wait and wait again.

Don't use that to hit the Americans with a stick, however! The fact is that World Aquatics (mainly in its time as FINA) has long been inconsistent with funding and rather uncaring when it comes to understanding the value of the Hall, let alone a potential far beyond what it has managed to do on the back of American funding, including the big local investment that went into renovating the Fort Lauderdale complex and keeping the Hall in Florida. 

The global regulator should take seriously its share of responsibility for the "repository" and link its own reform to that required at the Hall: funding it consistently and decently would be a good place to start a new process of international engagement. 

The rules and processes related to induction need to be overhauled, made fairer, more consistent, coupled independent oversight of the nominations and vetting procedures, too.

All athletes deserving of honour from wherever they hail from in the world should be eligible on even-keel criteria. No-one should be left to hope for the off chance that a new rule or condition will be added to the mixed bag of eligibility criteria as it was for Craig Beardsley, whose case, deserving as it may be, raises questions about many other cases of fair play and achievements left to wither unrecognised on the vine.

Time for review and reform, As noted, for many years, the Hall has been described as the official repository of FINA (World Aquatics) history. In many ways, that's true but not all of them to the good, among those honoured a closet-load of FINA-nominated skeletons who were clearly part of the problem, men who played a role in making sure athlete welfare was not the priority, officials and functionaries who were not 'best-of-class' in their roles and whose nominations were solely based on political expediency. 

And that at a time when Babshoff and Boglioli waited in line for recognition that their solo swims in Montreal would very likely have been good enough for gold had Fair Play not been torched by the mega fraud and abuse that was being run out of the official, IOC-accredited anti-doping laboratory in East Germany, where the task was not to catch cheating but to hide it from view - on a massive scale. 

It unfolded under the noses of Olympic apparatchiks unworthy of serving as guardians of athletes and sport, the very same men who in the 1990s, when the evidence came flooding in, said "nothing we can do... let sleeping dogs lie". 

They never do. 

While failure on that damaging scale has been honoured in Olympic circles for decades and the likes of National Olympic Committees, International and domestic federations have backed omertà over truth and justice, there was and remains no recognition for  generations of women swimmers from the 1970s and 1980s. 

Some of them - like Canadian Nancy Garapick, who has lived life as an "Olympic medallist" whose achievements many have forgotten when she might have been recognised as a national treasure who claimed double backstroke gold at her home Games; like her teammate Cheryl Gibson, a World Aquatics top tabler of late, who claimed silver behind a different dominant East German; like Enith Brigitha, of The Netherlands, who might well have been the first black woman to claim Olympic gold in the pool, 40 years before that achievement was celebrated by American Simone Manuel (imagine the life-saving and inspiration that might have been) - raced alongside Babashoff, Boglioli, Sterkel and the late Kim Peyton.

Sadly, Kim did not live to see The Last Gold, let alone the justice due to waves of women who knew her or knew of her half a century ago:

Time To End Decades Of Unfair Play

Meanwhile, Unfair Play, by Sharron Davies and this author, was shortlisted for Britain's top two Sports Book of the Year prizes last year and made the list of Books of The Year at The Times and Daily Telegraph. 

Unfair Play charts the horrid treatment of women in Olympic sports down the decades, in which the perpetrators are never called to account and their victims are kicked to the curb, insulted and harmed all over again with every passing season that ends under the headline "No Reconciliation, No Justice No Action - Yet Again!"

Below is a short extract from that book under a subheading of "Why Shirley Babashoff Was A Hero". 

Sharron was 13 years old and racing in Montreal at the first of her three Olympic Games for Great Britain. Four years later in Moscow, unlike Craig B, Sharron did get to race at the 1980 Olympics and excelled in the 400m medley.

She was awarded silver behind East Germany's Petra Schneider, who set a World record that remains the German standard to this day, the national swimming federation (DSV) having adopted all East German records as its own unified list of standards. That remained the case even after overwhelming evidence of systematic cheating was provided by prosecutors and accepted by those presiding over the Doping Trials of 1998-2000 that led to those aforementioned convictions, criminal and otherwise. 

Petra was among those who found the courage to testify and help convict those responsible for doping her from a very young age. But even when that evidence was met by the swimmer's acceptance that her achievements and subsequent long-term health problems had been fuelled by doping given to her without her knowledge, sport authorities did nothing.

In the case of Jim Thorpe and, for the past two decades in the IOC's "Take The Podium" program, in which medals known to have been claimed by those subsequently found to have gained by breaking anti-doping rules, we see Olympic bosses openly acknowledging hat justice must be done and be seen to have been done.

Right message. 

Half a century of denial is the wrong message.

Davies, Boglioli, Australia's Michelle Ford, as noted in her book Turning The Tide, also with this author, campaign for justice not for themselves but for their teammates and all the women affected by the biggest case of mass injustice in sports history. 

Sharron was the rightful winner that day in Moscow because the swimmer ahead of her had been boosted by years of testosterone injections and pills to propel her beyond her own time to times that would still be competitive and even victorious in the vast bulk of World Aquatics member nations around the world to this day. 

Here is a short extract from Sharron's recollections of the events of 1976 that would lead to induction in the Hall 48 years later: 

From Unfair Play, Forum/Swift Press.

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1800752822
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1800752825
  
  When Shirley Babashoff questioned the GDR results in Montreal, she made headlines around the world. Her home American media dubbed her “Surly Shirley”, “shrill” and “angry”. 
  
  When I think of the hateful labelling by trans activists of those standing up for hard-fought-for women’s rights, it reminds me of Shirley and her teammates Wendy Boglioli, Jill Sterkel and Kim Peyton, who against the odds took the one gold for American women in the pool in 1976 when they defeated the GDR in the 4x100m freestyle relay. Arguably, it remains the greatest team victory by any American relay in swimming history.
  
  As things turned out, Shirley wasn’t surly at all. She had every reason to raise a red flag. She would have been one of the golden greats of our sport, probably with several gold medals in Montreal, but she went home with one relay gold and several silvers and bronzes and was written up as a “sore loser”, alongside anyone else who dared question the GDR “success story”.
  
  In 1976, it was not the GDR conquerors that I looked up to but Shirley. She was a hero to me, one of the greats of swimming. She went home as the most medalled American woman in Olympic swimming history, with eight podiums from 1972 and 1976, her tally matching the biggest career total ever, held at the time by Australian legend Dawn Fraser.
  
  Dawn has spent most of her life as an official National Treasure Down Under191, reaping the rewards of that status. It was a very different story for Shirley. She coached swimming after her retirement but to make ends meet when her son was born, she took a job as a postwoman for the United States Postal Service in Orange County, California. And that is how she spent much of the rest of her working life, never having been able to capitalise on her real status and achievements as an athlete, for want of an Olympic gold in a solo race.
  
  All the gold medals in Shirley’s solo events, 100, 200, 400 and 800m in 1976 went to East Germans Kornelia Ender and Petra Thumer. Shirley had little to do with swimming for many years but in 2016 told her story in a fine autobiography with Chris Epting. 
  
  I had no connection to the East Germans and their teammates. I had no explanation for what they were doing. No official was asking any questions so there were no answers when it came to why they were so muscled and spoke with such a deep voice, why some of them had excessive body hair and serious acne that stretched well beyond facial pimples to scarring of the skin across shoulders and down the back. 
  
  I don’t know if the GDR girls even knew that we were angry that they were beating us, but as mentioned before they rarely seemed pleased, sometimes even embarrassed, so maybe they did. 
  
  We had the feeling that it wasn't that they didn't want to mix with us - they just weren't allowed to. They weren’t allowed to change with us or go on the same buses as us. I would often bring gifts of make up or tights for a Russian friend I had made, because during the cold war they struggled to get luxury items, and I remember once smuggling some to one of the GDR girls in the green room before a relay race. 
  
  Even though they were beating us, we felt sorry for them. We understood it wasn’t as if they had any choice in the matter.  We also felt it was important to tell the truth about what didn’t seem right, but we were told to keep quiet. Coaches like my dad got left off teams because they did speak out and bosses felt uncomfortable.  
  
  It wasn’t that you had no empathy with the East German girls, it was just that it all felt so very unfair to all of us following the rules and playing fair. It felt as though the truth was being quashed by those in charge.
  
  All the better for the rogues of the GDR, who relied on Olympic bosses to look the other way. Years later, in 1990, after the first details of the doping program were revealed on the eve of German reunification, the head of the doping program, Manfred Hoppner, would tell Stern Magazine that the GDR knew there were no effective doping controls back in the 1970s. 
  
  He also knew that the IOC-accredited laboratory at Kreischa in Saxony was part of the dark secret. Instead of trying to catch cheats, they tested to detect and hide positive tests to make sure that anyone who might get caught, like Krause and Thumer, did not travel outside the country.
  
  Those who did show up had already got away with it. They were officially “clean”. The drugs had already built the winning machine. Fair Play was dead and Olympic bosses have never even held an inquiry into any of it. Kreischa remains an anti-doping facility to this day.
  
  East Germany’s rise was meteoric. From 9 golds and 25 medals in all sports in 1968, the GDR had taken 20 golds and 66 medals in 1972. In 1976, the GDR forced the United States into third on the overall medals table. Its 40 golds and 90 medals in Montreal were second only to its political master, the Soviet Union.There's heaps more in the depths of that story at the heart of Sharron's story and an experience she has in common with the many women she speaks up for in Unfair Play.  

In 2022, World Aquatics bosses, the president Husain Al-Musallam and director Brent Nowicki pledged to right the wrongs of the past in the realm they have control over. They were sincere ins pledging what they did and their precise words reflected just that. Swimming regulators cannot touch Olympic medals - but they can honour their pledges and they can send the right message.

Time to get on with it! 

Same goes for the Hall, which, on the back of Craig B and the girls of The Last Gold, should open its own process of truth and reconciliation in a place that honours Petra S but not Sharon D. 

There is no justification for that. 

And if swimming - alongside Track and Field, with Seb Coe, a candidate for the IOC presidency, having pledged open support for a truth and reconciliation process to set right the wrongs of the GDR years he also lived through - gets it right, the chances are that the IOC will come to do the right thing. 

Podcast, including SOS, on the IOC presidential face - at Sports&Politics:

Podcast #2 zu den Kandidaten für die IOC-Präsidentschaft

Olympische Bildung: SPORT & POLITICS Podcast #2 zur Wahl des IOC-Präsidenten, zum merkwürdigen Wahlkampf, den bizarren Regeln und ersten Einschätzungen der sieben Kandidaten. Gäste: Craig Lord (State of Swimming, The Times), Sebastián Fest (El Mundo), Graham Dunbar (AP). 148 Minuten. Viel Vergnügen!

SPORT & POLITICSJens Weinreich

It's never too late to embrace the right thing and cast off their mantle of shame.

Meanwhile, the last word goes to the girls of the Last Gold from 1976 this day: not before time, here's to that recognition and celebration unlocking the door that's been slammed in the faces of female swimmers from the 1970s and 1980s, their coaches, parents, siblings, friends, communities and supporters around the world for far, far, far too long.  

• SOS dedicates this editorial to the women still waiting for their rightful rewards and in honour of Casey Converse, who passed away last month. Casey, a member of the USA men's team at the 1976 Olympics, penned Munich to Montreal: Olympic Swimming in a Tarnished Golden Era. While writing, Casey worked as a consultant for the The Last Gold.