United States’ Justin Gatlin
Usain Bolt returned to the track at the world championships yesterday and eased his way through the preliminary round of his favorite race, the 200 meters.
Justin Gatlin also cruised, doing nothing to diminish his role as Bolt’s top challenger.
Win or lose, Bolt will leave Beijing still hailed as his sport’s fun-loving Superman. The chances of Gatlin getting a champion’s send-off: slim to none.
Doesn’t bother him one bit.
“Sometimes it has to be fuel,” Gatlin told The Associated Press as he left the Bird’s Nest to cool down at the nearby practice field following a preliminary heat of 20.19 seconds. “If you don’t let anything affect you at all, you have nothing to pull off of when you’re already running on fumes.”
When Gatlin lined up for the 100-meter final Sunday night — a scintillating race he lost to Bolt by .01 seconds — he was on the line with three other athletes who had served doping bans: Tyson Gay, Asafa Powell and Mike Rodgers.
Their doping pasts have barely been footnotes to the narrative in the 100. And the other athletes competing in Beijing despite their doping pasts have essentially gotten a free pass, as well, even as track and field has been hit with multiple reports alleging doping among athletes in almost every corner of the sport.
Gatlin? He takes all the heat.
“If he wasn’t doing good, nobody would bring it up,” Dutch sprinter Churandy Martina said. “You do a million good things and one bad thing and people focus on the bad thing. It’s just people. It’s strange.”
There has been vigorous debate over whether a convicted doper should be able to compete again. Gatlin has been snubbed by some meets since his return from his second doping conviction in 2010.
But there is no keeping him out of major events like this one, or the Olympics.
In 2011 and 2012, the Court of Arbitration for Sport delivered a pair of decisions that spiked an International Olympic Committee rule banning anyone who’d served a doping suspension of longer than six months from competing in the next Olympics. Those decisions sparked debate about whether a lifetime ban should be in order for a first offense. That didn’t happen, but last year, the World Anti-Doping Agency passed a rule that allowed for a four-year sanction for a first offense.
“The reality is that your decisions have consequences and some are permanent,” U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart told the AP. “He made the decision to dope, and even if he’s fully eligible to compete again, some people can’t erase that from their minds.” Eddie Pells & Pat Graham, Beijing, AP
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