In track and field, one would think the Olympic motto has been revised from “faster, higher, stronger” to “inhale, inject, swallow.”
Track athletes’ consumption of performance-enhancing drugs has led the sport to be consumed by a doping scandal it cannot shake.
The U.S. Olympic track trials might as well have been sponsored by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, because the runners most closely watched were those with ties to the controversial California lab whose owner, Victor Conte, has been indicted for supplying banned drugs to athletes.
Then, in the middle of the trials, the Tribune disclosed on three successive days that three athletes from the pre-eminent U.S. track club, HSInternational, recently had tested positive for banned substances.
One of those cases involved a would-be Olympian, Torri Edwards, who made the U.S. team in the 100 and 200 meters.
But Tuesday, Edwards was handed a two-year ban that knocked her out of the Athens Games and gave two-time Olympic 100 champion Gail Devers the third U.S. spot in that race.
As if that weren’t enough, two of Greece’s biggest stars, Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, withdrew from the Olympics Wednesday in the midst of an investigation of their having missed three out-of-competition drug tests.
Kenteris, reigning Olympic champion in the 200, and Thanou, silver medalist in the Sydney women’s 100, had spent three days in an Athens hospital with injuries they claimed were the result of a motorcycle accident many Greeks think never happened.
“Greek people think most of the athletes are involved in doping,” said Dionysia Giavi of Krestina, a spectator at Wednesday’s shot put competition in ancient Olympia.
“[Kenteris and Thanou] were just fools caught red-handed. They cheated everybody.”
It is in that climate of suspicion that the rest of the 2004 track and field competition begins Friday at the Olympic Stadium, with an opening weekend highlighted by the men’s and women’s 100-meter races. The women’s final is Saturday, the men’s Sunday.
After all, one of the sport’s biggest stars, Marion Jones, has been implicated in the BALCO scandal and is under investigation by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, even though she never has failed a drug test.
Jones, defending Olympic champion in the 100, will not defend her title because she finished only fifth at the U.S. trials. Winner of three gold and two bronze medals in 2000, she qualified for just one individual event in Athens, the long jump.
Jones’ companion, 100-meter world record-holder Tim Montgomery, is missing from the men’s race, having failed to make the U.S. team. The USADA is seeking a lifetime ban on Montgomery based on evidence from the federal investigation of BALCO.
“The good things about us are being undermined by all the scandals,” said U.S. sprinter Lauryn Williams, the world’s third-fastest woman in the 100 this season.
The first major track doping scandal involved Ben Johnson of Canada, who lost his 100-meter gold at the 1988 Olympics after testing positive for steroids.
Drug use was common by then, in the state-sponsored doping programs of East Germany and the Soviet bloc and in the self-styled doping programs of U.S. athletes, but the public was ignorant of it.
Tests rarely caught big names until Johnson and two American world record-holders, Randy Barnes in the shot put and Butch Reynolds in the 400, tested positive for steroids in 1990.
“The Ben Johnson thing … was a big milestone in track and field, with a lot of them maybe to come in the future,” said Justin Gatlin of the U.S., a medal contender in the 100 and 200, punctuating his thought with a sardonic laugh.
“That’s just part of the deal. Things like that happen in sport all the time. We’ve just got to make sure we can get past it and make sure there are positive notes.”
Gatlin’s attitude reflects not cynicism but realism in a sport that no longer dares adopt an ostrich posture. Williams is equally candid.
“The faster you run, the less people are going to believe you’re a clean athlete, the more they are going to put you under the magnifying glass,” she said. “I’m willing to deal with it, if that’s what it takes. I can only control what I can control.”
Williams, 20, is among a dozen medal contenders in a wide-open women’s 100.
“I’m going to win, so it doesn’t matter,” Williams said.
Williams’ brashness, uncommon among women sprinters, is typical of the men.
“The person to beat in this race, since I’m a cocky person, is myself,” said Shawn Crawford of the U.S., the 2004 world leader in the 100 and 200.
“I don’t mind going in as the favorite,” said Jamaica’s Asafa Powell, who beat defending Olympic champion Maurice Greene in two recent races on the European circuit.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Greene said of the successive losses to Powell.
Greene, 30, is trying to become the first man to cross the 100-meter finish line first in two Olympics. Carl Lewis of the U.S. won two 100-meter golds, but the second came after Johnson’s disqualification.
“I think this is the most competitive [100] field in history,” Gatlin said.
“I don’t think anyone is the favorite out there.”
That would be a big change from the last Olympics, when both Jones and Greene easily lived up to their billing as heavy favorites in the 100s.
This time Greene is trying to outrun time. Powell is 21, Gatlin 22 and Crawford 26.
“It’s time for a new era,” Williams said.
That’s true in every sense of the word.
