SO, THE World Athletics Championships did serve a purpose in the end. They exposed the United States and its athletes as the whingeing, mewling, cheating, two-faced, lying, duplicitous, sanctimonious shower that they are. A case of sport imitating politics, you might say.
American athletes and athletics have for years preached and accused with equal measures of self-righteousness while being part of one of the most corrupt forces on the planet. Now the stories are being told. The cover-ups, the positive tests, the brazen abuse of worldwide conventions. The greed and hypocrisy of several decades is, at last, catching up with them. Sport imitating foreign policy, perhaps.
The United States won ten gold medals in Paris and three carried the taint of drug use. Kelli White’s supreme performances in the 100 metres and 200 metres and Jerome Young’s win in the 400 metres are utterly devalued; the first by a positive test for Modafinil, the second by news that Young was the American athlete who failed a drug test in the build-up to the Sydney Olympics, yet was allowed to compete by USA Track & Field (USATF) and returned home with a gold medal. It has taken three years for the story to come out, time in which, at any stage, Young’s masters could have come clean. They didn’t and neither did he. Even now, American athletics behaves like a law unto itself.
After White’s positive test had been revealed, USATF called a press conference with invitations glibly tagged: “An opportunity to meet Kelli White.” Not even our dear departed Alastair Campbell would have had the nerve to try that one (“An opportunity to meet Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the company of Lord Hutton . . .”).
During the carefully stage-managed affair, White showed no remorse, sticking instead to the line that she took the prescribed medicine to combat sleeping sickness and had no idea it was on any banned list. Had the judges been her star-spangled bosses and the explanation given in private, where the USATF conducts its drug-related business, no doubt she would have been treated as indulgently as Young.
Thankfully, White will face a more thorough examination from the IAAF, which will look first at the fact that she did not apply for exemption by declaring Modafinil (or Provigil, as it is known by its brand name in the US) on any list of medications taken before the race, and then at the information freely available that identifies it as a performance-enhancing banned drug, albeit one on the related substances list. The most rudimentary web search reveals the warning: “Athletes should be aware that one of the main ingredients of this product would produce a positive result in anti-doping tests.”
So there is nothing in White’s case to distinguish her from Andrea Raducan, the Romanian teenager who was stripped of gold in Sydney after taking a cold remedy, or the three cross-country skiers who lost their medals in Salt Lake City after testing positive for a drug on the related substances list. Contrary to protests, White has not committed a minor offence and if she is allowed to run at the Olympic Games in Athens next year her event will be tainted before the starter’s pistol fires.
Not that the United States’ female sprinters are strangers to such controversy. Marion Jones, darling of them all and returning to competition next season after becoming a mother, has existed in close proximity to drug cheats throughout her adult career. A previous coach was Trevor Graham, who instructed Young at the time he tested positive, her former husband is C. J. Hunter, removed from the Sydney Games after proving stuffed full of nandrolone, and earlier this year she was discovered working with Charlie Francis, the disgraced Canadian coach who introduced Ben Johnson to steroids.
Jones was so shameless about this latest association that she broke from Francis only when threatened financially by her sponsor, Nike. Tim Montgomery, her partner and father of her son, was not so quick off the blocks. No wonder. Montgomery went from a nonentity at the Sydney Games to the world record-holder two years later, coached by Graham. At 9.78sec, he became the first man to get inside Johnson’s illegal time in Seoul.
He moved on to Francis and quit under pressure shortly after Jones, since when he has run like a man with his laces tied together. Montgomery clocked 10.15sec at the American trials to scrape into the World Championships team and ran 10.11sec in fifth in the final. “I know I can run 9.75,” Montgomery said in the summer. He just needs the right coach, bless him.
And, yes, many associations have skeletons in the closet. Great Britain’s is called Linford. So, why single out the United States?
Because this is what they do. This is their speciality. Pointing the finger, muddying the water, placing the blame. Nothing screams louder or longer than American interest. Remember Mary Decker, spiked by the cursed Zola Budd? Now witness Jon Drummond’s childish show when disqualified in Paris, refusing to leave the track, lying down and bawling like a spoilt tot. The rules that hurt him were farcical — and television- driven, no doubt — but no more than those that banished Mark Roe from this year’s Open Championship at Sandwich. Yet while Roe behaved with resigned dignity and let fellow golfers and commentators make his doomed case, Drummond acted in such an immature manner that he lost all hope of a sympathetic hearing. His wail was the sound of the US deprived. Too used to having the planet dance to its tune, when its money and might do not prevail it is reduced to throwing tantrums. Still, at least in the world of sport it cannot send in the troops; just the clowns.
Except there is little to amuse in the sight of a nation bullying and swindling its way to the top. The Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games last year became an obscene, overblown exercise in American nationalism post-September 11: “Here they come, one of the nations President Bush describes as the Axis of Evil,” an NBC commentator intoned insanely as two forlorn skiers from Iraq made their lonely way around the stadium during the opening ceremony.
On February 20, Britain’s best gold medal hope went in the women’s skeleton. You probably won’t remember her – or it, skeleton being one of those wilfully obscure activities that takes longer to explain than it does to perform (bobsleigh on a tea tray is the quick capsule version) — but her name was Alex Coomber and she was the best in the world at that time.
On skeleton day at Salt Lake it began to snow. The slowing effect of snow is hell to skeleton sliders, whose runs are separated by hundredths of a second. When it came to Coomber’s turn, once the ice was cleared, she was made to wait at the start. For 30 seconds or more, snow fell and settled. No other slider had such a delay. She came third. Gold and silver went to Americans, one of whom had barely finished inside the top ten that season and had previously been censured for using illegal runners. The next night, Britain discovered curling and Coomber was forgotten. Approximately 30 seconds of snow seemed no big deal; but it does to her.
Set that against American media muscle at its most rampant and aggressive, getting the result, indeed the rules, of figure skating changed after evidence emerged of a carve-up between French and Russian judges. The case of the Canadian pair, Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, deprived of gold by the Russian duo, Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, in what turned out to be a votes trade-off, got the kind of 24-hour news attention that the steady stream of body bags returning from Iraq no longer warrants.
It became the stuff of pantomime and cultural stereotype; villainous French folk who couldn’t be trusted, the Russians up to no good as usual. In the end justice, of sorts, prevailed. The pairs each got gold medals. But is trading votes really all that different from putting the brakes on the best opponent or playing fast and loose with drug laws that should be tablets of stone?
Wade Exum, a former US Olympic official, claimed that more than 100 American athletes competed despite failing tests between 1988 and 2000 and returned with 19 medals. How much digging is CNN doing on that tale?
Those inside the sports know. At the Sydney Games, the athletes convened in a giant hall before marching out for the opening ceremony. When the United States’ name was called, it was booed. Not by a biased crowd, as with Serena Williams at the French Open tennis, but by its athletics peers. Now the World Championships has made that disapproval public. Not such a waste of time after all, then.
