By Damian Spellman, PA Sport

Former world and Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson on Sunday accused athletics chiefs of putting money before the need to eliminate drugs from the sport.

Speaking just hours after Russian Olga Yegorova carried off the 5,000m gold medal at the World Championships in Edmonton despite having earlier tested positive for the banned drug EPO, Thompson urged the authorities to launch a fresh purge on the cheats.

Yegorova - the subject of a very public trackside protest by British athletes Paula Radcliffe and Hayley Tullet on Friday - was reinstated after having a ban lifted when it was discovered that the original test had not been carried out in the correct way.

"It seems to me that she's been let off on a technicality for the EPO," said Thompson, speaking on Radio 5 Live's Sportsweek programme from Canada.

"EPO is one of those things that you don't get in cough mixture, you don't get it in any over the counter medicine, you can only get it into your body because you've put it there.

"So her getting away with it on a technicality just seems such a shame because I think it sends out another message to people that it's possible to cheat and get away with it now.

"I would rather we fell down because we're trying too hard to eliminate the drugs cheats than to think that my sport wasn't doing enough to catch them.

"There will always be people who will try to cheat. People cheat on taxes, people cheat on their wives, people cheat on their husbands.

"It's a fact of life that there'll always be people happy to take short cuts. I don't think the war against cheating will ever be won.

"But what I do think is that we have to be vigilant and we have to take the fight to them and we have to be prepared to go to court and face litigation and whatever in order to show people that we really care about the sport.

"The people in charge, it seems to me, only care about money and their position, and I think the sport should be more important than them."

Thompson's charge was quickly denied by IAAF general secretary Istvan Gyulai, who said that the governing body had little choice but to reinstate Yegorova because of the irregularities with the first test in Paris.

He dismissed Thompson's claim that money was the overriding consideration and promised that the fight against drugs in the sport would go on.

"I don't believe that if what we have done here is followed closely and looked at in detail, that we can be accused of anything," he said.

"Performance is important, nobody can deny that. Daley Thompson would be the last to say that performance doesn't matter. But money is also important. We wouldn't be able to run our programme.

"But to make a direct link between EPO or drugs or cheating and money, I think that would be a farcical conclusion.

"We will continue to fight against drugs, but I don't believe it's as widespread as some of the media present it.

"Drugs are a side of sport, not athletics, of sport, and if we are going to fight it, that has to be done together, all sports, all sports federations, society.

"It's not just for athletics and not just for the IAAF to play the role we have to."

Meanwhile, Thompson blamed the relative lack of British success in Edmonton on the glory days in last summer's Sydney Olympics.

"I actually think that we've stood still and enjoyed ourselves and sort of patted ourselves on the back when all the rest of the world are thinking: 'We've got to get better, we've got to catch up to the British'," he said.

"Now we're at the back of the pack whereas we should have been continuing to want to get better and make some more improvements."