"People have more questions than answers - why his time has been so short," said Gatlin, who is in the field for the 100m at which Gay will make his comeback on July 3 at the International Association of Athletics Federations' (IAAF) Diamond League meeting in Lausanne.

Gatlin, who will race over 100m tomorrow at the IAAF Diamond League meeting in Rome, has himself had not one but two doping bans reduced.

In 2001 he earned a two-year ban after testing positive for amphetamines, but won early reinstatement from the IAAF after arguing that his test had been due to medication he had been taking since childhood for attention deficit disorder.

When Gatlin tested positive again in 2006, he avoided what would have been an automatic lifetime ban for a second offence by cooperating with the doping authorities, who also took into consideration the "exceptional circumstances" of his first doping case.

On August 22, 2006 Gatlin agreed to an eight-year ban, but in a final ruling on December 31 2007 that ban was halved.

On the subject of Gay, Gatlin told BBC Radio 5 Live: "There's still a lot of pressure on him coming back.

"It's not just on you as a person but on your family, your friends and your associates.

"You've got to live in a different comfort zone now."

Gatlin made headline news at the last Diamond League meeting in Rome when he beat world record holder Usain Bolt by one hundredth of a second in the 100m.

But the main news in Rome this year looks more likely to come from the high jump event, where the field includes Russia's Olympic champion Ivan Ukhov, Ukraine's world champion Bohdan Bondarenko, US Olympic silver medallist Erik Kynard, Qatar's world indoor champion Mutaz Essa Barshim, and Derek Drouin of Canada, a joint-bronze medallist with Barshim at London 2012.

Russia's Olympic high jump champion Ivan Ukhov leads this year's world rankings in an event where five or six men are operating at a similar high level - and tomorrow's IAAF Diamond League in Rome features most of them ©Getty Images

Ukhov's 2.42 metres indoor jump in February has only been bettered by the man whose world record of 2.45m has stood since 1993, Cuba's Javier Sotomayor, and he leads this season's outdoor rankings with 2.41m, a centimetre more than Drouin and Bondarenko have managed.

Barshim produced a 2.37m effort at his home Diamond League in Doha last month.

A world record looks possible, if not tomorrow, then - given the overall vitality of this event - some time this season.

On a track where Hicham El Guerrouj set the current world 1500m record of 3min 26.00sec back in 1998, the metric mile will bring together Kenya's 2013 world champion Asbel Kiprop and Djibouti's 2014 world indoor champion Ayanleh Souleiman.

The Djibouti athlete earned victory in the mile at the Eugene Diamond League last Saturday (May 31) in a personal best of 3:47.32, with Kiprop only managing seventh place.

Meanwhile, there will be a strong focus on Jamaica's Olympic and world champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the IAAF World Athlete of the Year for 2013, who performed disappointingly over 200m in the Oregon city of Eugene, when she suffered problems with her left leg.

She returned with a relatively low-key 100m win last night in Switzerland, but she will face a much stiffer test with the likes of the Ivory Coast's world silver medallist Murielle Ahoure and three other Moscow 2013 100m finalists in her race.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


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