To compile my list of the top 50 track and field athletes in Olympic history, first I needed to set guidelines. There would be no place, I decided, for athletes with proven or strong circumstantial links to doping and there would be little sympathy for those who, no matter how many silver or bronze medals they had won, had not been winners.

So, on the first count, out went Ben Johnson, Marion Jones, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Heike Drechsler and Renate Stecher. Johnson and Jones because they were proven cheats, Griffith-Joyner because of circumstantial evidence, Stecher and Drechsler because they competed for East Germany in the age of that country’s systematic state doping.

To my banned list I added Irina and Tamara Press, the Soviet sisters who won five Olympic gold medals between them, but whose careers came to an abrupt halt upon the introduction of sex tests.

My ‘gold medallists only’ rule I took down as far as No 48 before giving sympathetic votes to Frankie Fredericks and Merlene Ottey. While it is true that Ottey failed a drugs test in 1999, her ban was lifted when the Swiss laboratory that handled her sample was found to have tested it improperly.

But out completely are Raelene Boyle, the Australian who won three individual sprint medals, but no gold, and Herb McKenley, the Jamaican who won three individual medals at 200 metres and 400 metres with gold only in a relay.

The worth of relay medals compared with individual ones, whether to include results from the 1906 interim Games, and whether to give credence to discontinued events were all factors taken into consideration. I chose to load heavily on individual events, lightly on relays, but included 1906 results...