With the world's elite bob skeleton athletes engaged in the second stop of their World Cup season at Park City, Utah, the reverberations are still being felt from the season opener which concluded on Saturday (November 30) in Calgary.

There were tears before bedtime in the Canadian city which hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics as Noelle Pikus-Pace was disqualified after her sled failed a post-race inspection.

The American slider had produced a final flourish on her second run to move into gold medal position 0.16sec ahead of Britain's world junior champion Lizzie Yarnold, who led after the first of two runs.

However, a post-race inspection by the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation discovered an "illegal" piece of tape wrapped around the handle of Pikus-Pace's sled, and Yarnold moved up into gold medal position.

The tape, which could aid an athlete's grip on the sled, had allegedly been cleared earlier in the week by international sliding officials.

On her Facebook page, Pikus-Pace implied that British Skeleton had made the protest, although a team spokesperson denied this.

"My heart is broken. I just won gold in the first World Cup and have been disqualified due to a protest," she wrote.

"My sled was cleared by the international federation for competition but, without a warning, they disqualified me for having three pieces of tape on my handle to help me push my sled, which many athletes do."

Noelle Pikus Pace, no stranger to ill fortune after a freak accident broke her leg, was "heartbroken'" over losing the Calgary World Cup title after being disqualified on a technical infringement ©Getty Images

Pikus-Pace, who retired from the sport in 2010 but returned this year, is no stranger to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. She competes with a titanium rod in her leg after it was broken in a freak accident in 2005 - and in Calgary - when a four-man bobsleigh came off the track and the finish and crashed into her and a team-mate.

"So sad and disappointed that thousands of hours of training come down to a protest and decision for three pieces of non-performance-enhancing tape," Pikus-Pace continued. "I would have obviously removed it if they had told me in my sled inspection."

Here is the latest reminder of the thin line between sporting gain and sporting pain. There are many examples where sporting protagonists have distorted the rules in an effort to gain an advantage - Boris Onischenko's rigged foil in the modern pentathlon fencing competition at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, or the recent admission by US speed skater Simon Cho that he bent his rival's skate blades out of shape before a competition.

Not so grey - US speed skater Simon Cho admitted tampering with the skate blade of a rival 
©Getty Images

However, the category in which Pikus-Pace found herself in last weekend was not one of deliberate wrongdoing, it would appear, but one of uncertainty. In short, a grey area.

And the grey area is pretty heavily populated in world sport. The frustration felt by Pikus-Pace would surely have been akin to that experienced by Scotland's bowler Margaret Letham, a Scottish player who encountered an unexpected challenge when on the verge of winning the women's world outdoor singles title in Moama, New South Wales in 2000.

"The gold medal seemed to be hers when she defeated Ireland's Margaret Johnston (the most successful woman bowler in the game) in a group match," recalled bowls expert David Rhys. "Johnston responded by challenging Letham's bowls, which she alleged were 'too straight'."

Bowls is all about bias, of course, and the curved path of each bowl must equal or exceed that of a Master Bowl that represents the minimum bias. Straight-running bowls (i.e. those that swing less than the Master Bowl) make life too easy, and are deemed to be illegal.

"The bowls were tested overnight on a testing table - and failed the test," said Rhys Jones. A distraught Letham was stripped of the points, which were added to Johnston's total - and it was Johnston who went on to head the table, qualify for the final, and win the title.

There was no suggestion that Letham had tampered with the bowls, or was deliberately cheating – she had been given the bowls especially for the world championships by a leading manufacturer. Other similar bowls failed the test, too.'

Rhys Jones added that it is the manufacturer who has the duty of testing and then stamping bowls before putting them on the market. These tests then need to be carried out regularly – "like an MOT".

Every wood in bowls requires to pass its own "MOT'"to be eligible for use in competition 
©Getty Images

He commented: "It has been known for bowls to be tampered with. Rubbing the bias side with sandpaper or emery cloth changes the template of the bowl, and alters the bias.

"And, although bowls is all about bias, it is generally felt that reducing the bias makes it easier to get near the jack, so there is often a great deal of hostility towards those who have 'straight' bowls.'"

Letham was so upset about the turn of events which had halted her aspirations in the individual event that she did not bother to turn up for the sixth place play-off match. But she felt a little happier by the end of the championships, having won the pairs title with fellow Scot Joyce Lindores.

The parallel to this kind of technical error on the doping side would be the sportsman or woman who was genuinely unaware that they had taken a substance which contained elements contrary to the banned list.

The spate of nandrolone positives within athletics in the late 1990's almost certainly contained a good number of "grey" errors, in that scientific tests subsequently proved that up to 16 per cent of commercially produced nutritional supplements were contaminated by steroids. Was this why the European 1998 200m champion, Dougie Walker, or the virtually retired Linford Christie tested positive for the easily detectable steroid during this period?

Doug Walker, seen here winning the European 200m title in 1998, may have fallen victim to faulty manufacturing conditions when he tested positive for nandrolone the following year
©Getty Images




The guiding principle in doping is that an athlete is responsible for whatever is in their system even if they claim not to know how it got there, as the bottom line is that they are likely to have benefited from performance enhancement, even if it is unwitting.

The same principle was applied to Letham, and most recently to Pikus-Pace. It was a grey day for the American - who will be convinced that the tape which led to her disappointment was red tape.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, covered the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics as chief feature writer for insidethegames, having covered the previous five summer Games, and four winter Games, for The Independent. He has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, The Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. His latest book Foul Play – the Dark Arts of Cheating in Sport (Bloomsbury £12.99) is available at the insidethegames.biz shop. To follow him on Twitter click here.