Justin Gatlin has just left the room. His proud parents, Willie and Jeanette, sit back-to-back in matching “Gatlin Goes to the Games” T-shirts, telling tales of how a precocious child who played piano and sax grew up to be, at 22, the world’s fastest human.
Trevor Graham stands 10 feet away.
He is not surrounded the way the Gatlins are. A few stragglers are gathered at 1 a.m. near Graham, who is the new Olympic 100-meter dash champion’s coach.
And one asks a rather bizarre question:
“Would you be standing here as coach of the winner if you hadn’t turned in the syringe?”
Graham is unruffled.
“I can’t predict what would have happened,” he says matter-of-factly.
“You don’t know.”
There is a momentary pause.
“I was just a coach doing the right thing,” Graham says. “No regrets.”
The syringe in question is a key to the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroid investigation that has sullied American sport, track and field in particular.
A hypodermic needle handed over voluntarily to investigators by an anonymous coach allegedly contained traces of a new designer steroid and provided damaging evidence in the case against world-class athletes’ unlawful and unethical use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Never before had Graham acknowledged being the coach responsible for turning in the scandal’s so-called smoking gun.
But here he is, doing so off-handedly in the hours after his own athlete’s most monumental triumph.
Perhaps an unexpected question caught the coach off guard. Graham had been a personal coach to two of track’s stellar sprinters, 100-meter world record-holder Tim Montgomery and 2000 Sydney Olympics gold medalist Marion Jones, but is no longer with either.
Montgomery has been implicated in the BALCO case and gave testimony before a San Francisco grand jury.
The reputation of Jones, who has a child with Montgomery, was besmirched by her ex-husband, former Olympic shot putter C.J. Hunter, who told federal authorities that not only did he see Jones take hormones and steroids, he assisted her with the injections.
It is the last subject Gatlin cares to have broached on the happiest night of his life, a victory in Greece in a personal-best 9.85 seconds Sunday over a field including the 2000 Sydney men’s champion, Maurice Greene.
Someone dares bring it up, but nothing can faze Gatlin on his night of nights. Asked to confirm that he is “a genuine, clean” champion, he does precisely that, word for word, and then makes his own personal appeal.
“We want to bring positivity back to this sport,” the new sprint king declares.
The negatives abound. So many athletes of quality are not here, for one reason or another. Some have been banned. Others withdrew or did not qualify. Montgomery, had he made it to Athens, might have won the gold medal that Gatlin now wears.
Thus, the syringe inquiry.
Because if Montgomery’s relationship with his coach had remained intact, possibly he and Graham would be in Greece right now with no one the wiser.
Instead, it is Gatlin who is having the time of his life. He mugs for TV cameras before the race, pointing to his chest with both index fingers, winking, even doing a 360-degree twirl.
Few anticipate a Gatlin first-place finish in the 100 over Asafa Powell, a very fast man from Jamaica, or the likes of American teammates Greene and Shawn Crawford.
He is as unlikely to win this race as Portgual’s Francis Obikwelu is to break 10 seconds for the first time in 2004 and run second.
Bashful or not, Gatlin did indeed win the race. He dropped to his knees, folded his hands in prayer and mouthed toward the gods high above Greece: “Thank you.”
A minute or two later, he crowed to the world: “I’m here to make history!”
But as the clock strikes 1, it is a humble Gatlin who pleases his parents and charms a roomful of strangers by saying, “I’m just honored to be in one of the best races in history, and one of the fastest.”
He is not here to talk about hypodermic needles or positive drug tests.
He is here to talk about positivity.
And about a race he just won, fair and square.
