Posted by Elizabeth Merrill on 4/20/2008, 6:24 am
76.5.16.188
That last night in Sydney, LaTasha Colander-Clark slept with the medal. The hunk of gold must have been magic for the former Wilson High track star (Class of '95), because little kids would ask to touch it, just to feel what she had. She gave it to her dad, a strong, religious Vietnam veteran. She'd never seen him cry, not even when Grandma died, but when she handed him the medal, the reverend sobbed.
Now, she dodges questions about where her father keeps it. If they knew, would they knock on the door and take it, like collection agents on a repo run? Could they wipe away eight years and say it didn't really happen?
There always will be the photos. The three of them are standing there with Marion Jones, arms entwined, doubled over in exhaustion and giggles. They are young and beautiful and the best, and have just won the 4x400-meter relay at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. One of them (we now know) is fueled by performance-enhancing drugs. "I don't want [this to be] about Marion," Colander-Clark says. "I want people to know there are still innocent athletes out there today."
Oh, but it is about Marion. Her tearful confession, her relinquishment of her medals, her eight teammates now being asked to give theirs back. One week ago, the International Olympic Committee executive board disqualified and stripped the medals from all the U.S. sprinters who medaled with Jones in the 400 and 1,600 relays in 2000.
In one sweeping decision, from a governing body 7,000 miles away in Beijing, eight women lost not just their hardware; they lost their identities. Today, seven of them have banded together with Washington-based lawyer Mark Levinstein in the hopes that they will win an appeal in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Today, their immortality fades in a world numbed by testosterone creams and lies.
"It's a part of my destiny," Colander-Clark says. "We're fighting for our legacy. We're fighting to be remembered. We trained and we busted our butts and we did good. We did it the way it should be done. "We still should be remembered as champions."
The phone jangled on a Thursday evening in early October 2007, and Passion Richardson -- 2000 Sydney bronze medalist Passion Richardson -- was jolted from her couch. "Turn on the news," a friend said. "Marion has just admitted to doping."
Mouth agape, shoulders dropped, Richardson hung up to call her parents. Her mom answered, and Richardson uttered no hello, just six nonsensical words. "They're coming to get our medals."
She knew then, on the eve of Jones' courthouse bombshell, that it would be nearly impossible to escape the taint. It passed through the flickering camera lights in White Plains, N.Y., where Jones pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about using performance-enhancing drugs and her role in a check fraud scam. It seeped over to the U.S. Olympic Committee, which quickly urged Jones' relay teammates to give back their medals. "Completely tarnished," USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth said of the medals.
Nearly seven months later, Richardson clutches her bronze as if it were a baton and she were running the final leg of a 4x100. Her tiny 5-foot-1 body is behind a desk at the University of Kentucky -- she works in the admissions office -- but everybody knows she's something else. When her boyfriend introduces her to his friends, he starts with, "Have you ever met an Olympic medalist?"
"They're proud of that," Richardson says. "It's not for me to talk about; it's for my friends and my family. That's for them. I ran track for 16 years. I'm 33, so half my life, that's what I did. "I've had some people say, 'Well, just give it back.' If you went through what we went through to earn it, you're not going to give it back. How do you just give it back, when she had absolutely no regard for the other people she was competing with?"
Thing is, Richardson isn't giving it back. It is preserved in a frame with her uniform, a USA bib and a picture from Sydney, all of which hangs in her father's office in Florida. No, she says, she will not ask her family to give it back. And therein lies a sticky dilemma for the USOC: What if the runners lose their appeal and still won't give their medals back?
USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel says there isn't a protocol for how medals are confiscated. Jones' were collected at her attorney's office in Austin, Texas, by representatives from the USOC and U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. She agreed to give those up. Seibel has declined to say what the USOC will do if the relay members aren't as cooperative.
"They have a right to an appeal," he says. "Until that process has had a chance to run its course, it would be premature to [talk] about how something like that would happen.
"I think the whole situation is unfortunate. It illustrates just how far-reaching the consequences of doping can be. This is one example of a choice made by one athlete impacting not just the relay team members, but all the other athletes who participate in those events as well."
They never were really friends. It seems strange to outsiders, that these women could share something so singular, yet be so detached from each other. Drafted to run together early in the summer of 2000, the members of the 1,600 relay team didn't practice as a full group until they got to Sydney.
The timing had to be perfect. Three good handoffs, Colander-Clark says, with the world screaming and cheering. One botched exchange, and their moment would have been over.
"It's amazing how it can all come together," she says. "Like it was meant to be."
It didn't always all come together. Four years later in Athens, Colander-Clark was denied a medal while on a relay team with Jones because of a bobbled exchange. And Jones' relay teammates competed against her in individual events, inevitably, like the rest of the world, losing.
In 2000, Jones was America's golden girl, the biggest thing from the University of North Carolina since Michael Jordan. Endorsements piled up faster than her record five medals in Sydney.
On and off the track, Richardson says, their relationship was more business than casual. In the Olympic village, Richardson was more inclined to mingle with foreign athletes than hang with Jones. The disconnect, runners say, isn't all that unusual. Sprinters have different coaches and often live on opposite sides of the country.
"A lot of people assume because you're on a relay team that you know each other really well, personally," Richardson says. "That's not always the case. Friends, to me, are people I talk to on a daily basis that know me inside and out personally. I don't think any of those women know me like that."
The 2000 4x400 also took chemistry and teamwork. Jearl Miles-Clark gave the Americans an early lead with a 51.4-second first leg, and Monique Hennagan matched it. Jones, legs burning from the grind of five events, blew the thing open with a 49.40.
Her teammates say they didn't know Jones was doping. In the days after her admission, People.com reported that an unnamed source close to Jones said she was "extremely concerned" about what would happen to the medals of her relay teammates.
But all Richardson and Colander-Clark heard was the TV version, in which she said she let down her country, her family and herself. "When she stood on the courthouse steps … she apologized to her entire family, she apologized to her fans, she apologized to her husband and her children," Richardson says. "Nowhere in that were there any sincere apologies to her teammates. I can't explain why. I'm not Marion. She knows what's going on."
"It would've been hard if I was forced to give it back," Hamm says. "It would've been devastating. The competition was over; I had the medal around my neck. How many sporting events end with the competition being decided days after by somebody else?"
Every so often, Richardson will open a letter, and it's from someone in a penitentiary, telling her to hang in there. No, she says, smiling, it's not from Marion. Maybe it's a guy who saw her on a television from thousands of miles away, running for her country, becoming something only a fraction of a fraction of the world does.
Richardson doesn't know what she'll someday tell her kids about those days in Sydney. She doesn't know how she and the other women who ran with Jones will pay for an appeal. Sometimes, the women wonder whether the USOC has turned its back on them because Jones was its star athlete and made the country look bad.
The USOC steadfastly has said the relay events were won unfairly. Messages to Jones' lawyer, Henry DePippo, were not returned. So now the women wait, for the right to be old and gray with stories that warm up barstools. They wait for the past to outlive the future.
"To me, it doesn't matter what they decide," Richardson says. "You can't change the fact that I was actually there in 2000. You can't change the event. In my heart, in my family and friends', I'll always be an Olympic champion in their eyes. "You don't just take that away from me."
Elizabeth Merrill is a senior writer for ESPN.com. She can be reached at merrill2323@hotmail.com
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