Martin Pipe: 'When he moved forward he took the goalposts with him'

It goes down as one of the most shameful racing chapters of the 20th century. The reputation of a trainer who rewrote records was cut to shreds by contemporaries whose amateurism he exposed by his novel brilliance.

For five years from the late 1980s Martin Pipe’s reward for redefining his art was to be assailed by a torrent of abuse. He bore the brunt of sinister slurs from contemporaries who refused to believe what they were seeing with their own eyes.

In some respects their scepticism can be reconciled. At that time the era of East Germany's doped athletes was still a poignant memory. A new strain of it was also emerging in China, where athletes trained by Ma Junren were demolishing world records by scarcely credible margins. Junren attributed it to a diet of turtle blood until his athletes blew the whistle.