A game of two halves may not be athletics parlance, but it would be applicable to Wednesday night’s Panorama documentary ‘Catch me if you can’.
The second half the Alberto Salazar bit was revelatory and worthy of the time and money the BBC put into the project.
Whether Mo Farah now decides to stick with the coach who has helped turn him from a very good athlete into a world class one is intriguing.
The first half the Allan Wells bit was flimsy and lacking journalistic clout.
I don’t know if Wells is a drugs cheat. Like every other Scot over the age of 40 (apart from Drew McMaster it would seem) I sincerely hope he isn’t.
But Daly’s investigative work certainly didn’t convince me of his guilt.
There was McMaster’s testimony. Nothing new there.
There was the testimony of a reporter who couldn’t pin anything solid on Wells years ago. Nothing new there either.
And there was the excerpt from a transcript of a taped recording of McMaster speaking to the doctor said to have supplied Wells his performance-enhancing anabolic steriods.
If this tape recording is the smoking gun then why didn’t we hear it?
Unproven suspicion and gossip surrounding Wells, and his transformation from a nothing special long-jumper to a gold medal-winning sprinter, isn’t new. It’s been hanging in the air for decades.
‘Catch me if you can’ has given the subject more publicity than ever before, that’s for sure. But take away the Panorama packaging, and unproven suspicion is still as substantive as it gets.