The South Australian Athletic League has received a Supreme Court summons initiated by the initial runner-up in its most recent edition of the Bay Sheffield.

Tom Sclanders, narrowly beaten in the final of the Bay, one of Australia's most prestigious and time-honoured "pro" running events alongside the Stawell and Burnie Gifts, was later disqualified, it appears, for inconsistency in the lead-up to the big race.

At the heart of the dispute is a new handicapping and race integrity system instituted by the SAAL Board. The Board has now reportedly resigned en masse.

Professional running is one of Australia's oldest forms of competitive sporting activity with a history stretching back 150 years. These days apart from the odd race here and there in Scotland it's unique to this country.

Because the events are based on handicaps allocated to each athlete according to past or known form, consistency of performance has always been a vital criteria for those charged with allocating the marks.

This combined with a stewarding process through which race officials are required to determine whether each athlete is running on their merits is the safety net which provides the sport's integrity.

On the face of it heading off to the highest court in South Australia over what is in effect $2500 in prizemoney and a sash seems a little over the top, but that's where it is.

Until 1985 athletics in Australia was a divided sport with the pros and the amateurs each a clearly defined species with no interchange between the two.

Once a runner opted for a pro career there was no turning back. Reinstatement to amateur ranks was available but the regulations and process were so stringent it was mostly only granted to those whose career was essentially over.

But under the leadership of its then-president Graeme Briggs a century of quarrelling and inflexibility was tossed out in an instant. Within a year two recent Stawell Gift winners - John Dinan and the late Chris Perry were in the Australian team at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games.

Coming from Tasmania where the combined running, cycling and wood-chopping carnival scene is iconic, Briggs had empathy for its participants.

He was also a reformer and understood well that providing diversity within the sport would be essential in coming decades. Briggs saw that the competition for active hearts and minds would step up a notch with the advent of new sports and new formats for traditional ones.

And he also believed that handicapped running would be a good early season training option for the better amateurs.

The opening up of the sport to all - including women who had only rarely had a chance to compete in the pro scene previously - did however provide its challenges.

Much of this surrounded the notion of consistency of performance.

It was accepted as pretty common practice that when a trainer of a pro runner thought he had a boy who could win a big one, the lad was often put on "ice". Most often this meant he did not run at all, engaging in competitive action only in trials with his own training squad behind closed doors.

There were also stories of runners who did run being nobbled in some way to ensure they did not put their handicap in jeopardy. Filling stomachs with too much liquid before a run or attaching a belt with a few extra pound around the waist were some of the less colourful or dangerous techniques.

The newly-arrived amateurs however had run often, at least weekly, in interclub competition if not more in between.

It meant they had plenty of disclosed form to help allocate handicaps but there was no requirement in the amateur ranks to compete with bona fide effort all the time. It was not uncommon to use minor meets as training, perhaps not even finishing races.

This was a major teething problem early on but solutions came.

As more and more "ammos" started winning the big races, the culture began to change among the traditional "pros". Hiding away became a rarity.

It's therefore understandable that a body like the SAAL would seek to develop a system which it believed would deliver greater integrity in the current paradigm.

But it seems it's not universally popular.