In 1998, Jerome Young, Antonio Pettigrew, Tyree Washington and Michael Johnson set the American 4x400m record with a time of 2:54.20. That record is in discussions to be removed, with the 2:54.29 that was run in the 1993 World Outdoor Championships getting reinstated. Young was banned for life in 2004, and Pettigrew has recently admitted to doping as far back as 1997.
“Removing this record is the right thing to do, pure and simple,” USATF CEO Doug Logan said. “We have no interest in a record that the facts – not rumors – have exposed as being achieved by fraudulent means by at least one athlete on the team. Obviously, Tyree Washington and Michael Johnson played no part in the doping activities of others, and it is a shame that they may suffer as a result. But our message is clear: compete clean, win clean and break records clean. Or, get out of our sport and out of our record books.”
I hope that the record is removed, and I hope that athletes are taking notice. I am sure that Michael Johnson would agree; he has already returned a gold medal from the 2000 Olympics that he had won on a different team with Pettigrew. Michael Johnson will still own the American record, since he was also on the 1993 team. The real victim here is Tyree Washington.
(More Info: USATF)
Again, though, the whole thing is a farce – does anyone *really* believe Michael Johnson ran clean? A man who knocked a whole bunch off of his own 200m world record in Atlanta in 1996 at 19.32 seconds and nobody else has come within 0.30 of a second of that time since? Who did the second half of that 200m in 9.20 seconds?
I like Johnson and have enormous respect for the man. Whether he took drugs or not is immaterial to me, as everybody else he competed with was taking them too. It’s a level playing field, and if they were all totally clean, he’d still have won – he *was* that much better.
What I don’t like, as before, is this idea that a few guys are being scapegoated while the champions, who are in many cases significantly faster while allegedly running clean, are being held up as heroes and icons.
I’m not sure I agree with any policy where medals and records are removed years later. If you get caught at the time – like Johnson in ’88 – then fair enough. Otherwise, just leave them alone. Maybe once a year has passed, that should be the cutoff point.
As stated before, I don’t have any reason to assume that an athlete is dirty just because they are good. I don’t assume that every single athlete is doping just because a small minority of them get caught.
It’s less that to me and more that in a few cases – Johnson, Flo Jo, Lance Armstrong – the people in second, third, fourth, tenth, 100th place get caught using, even though they don’t get anywhere *near* to the times of the athletes listed above. It’s simple logic to work out that therefore by default everybody else above them must be getting the good stuff, too.
One could argue that this is the reason why the lower-placed guys resort to using, but that’s simply not true – the examples of ‘winners’ like Ben Johnson, Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery and the like prove otherwise, as well as Lynford Christie and even holier-than-thou Carl Lewis being clouded in suspicion more than once.
All of these athletes are good. They’re genetic freaks. It’s the same in all sports where drugs are the reason for the massive advancements in performance since the 1960s – running, cycling, even bodybuilding. As said, I believe every single sport – apart from field hockey and figure skating – has had one or more athletes test positive for banned substances.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger once wisely observed in an interview back in the 70s, he uses performance-enhacing drugs because they give him ‘an extra ten per cent’.
It’s the same for everybody else, too. And that’s the difference between 10.68 and 9.68 in the 100m dash. 🙂
I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. I’d love to believe Lance Armstrong, Michael Johnson and Flo-Jo were clean while everybody else was so inferior they had to use drugs to get even close to keeping up – and still failed. But I just don’t think the world of professional sports is that much of a utopia. Far from it.
It isn’t going to change my stance.
And as for Lance Armstrong specifically, he has been drug tested more than any single other athlete in history, and has passed every single drug test. The only time that it can be proven that he has used performance enhancing drugs, he was going through chemotherapy and it was part of his treatment because without them he would be dead.
The thing is, loads of the athletes who ultimately failed tests passed X amount of times before. I think in some cases it’s just a combination of superior timing, enhancers that at the time were not traceable or sheer dumb luck. Or all three.
As we discussed recently on here Marion Jones failed and she never got anywhere near to Flo Jo’s best times.
I’d love to believe Armstrong was just superhuman but all logic, instinct and intuition suggests otherwise, unfortunately.