LONDON — Twice-banned for doping, distrusted by fellow athletes, trained in the past by a notorious doping coach and now by another man once banned for drugs,. Justin Gatlin was supposed to represent the bad old days of athletics.
Instead, at an age when most sprinters are slowing down and slacking off, he is closing 2014 as its superstar present: Unbeaten all year, owner of six of the seven fastest 100m this season and, nominated this month as one of the IAAF’s male athletes of the year.
This has been no quiet drift into sporting old age from the former Olympic and world champion. Aged 32, Gatlin is now running faster than when he was known to be cheating.
This summer he ran the fastest 100m and 200m times by a man in his thirties. Last month in Brussels, he pulled off the fastest-ever one-day sprint double, clocking 9,77 seconds for the 100m an hour before running the 200m in 19,71. Two months earlier, in Monaco, he had run 19,68 for the 200m, against a previous legal PB of 20,03.
Shouldn’t we be celebrating these great feats of sprinting? Isn’t this one of the great comeback stories in sport?
Gatlin, banned once as a young man, banned again in 2006 — initially for life, eventually, after negotiations and appeals, for four years — is a hard man for many in the sport to trust.
To run 9,77 dirty is one thing. To do so again, supposedly clean, at an age when no other man has got close, is too much for some to believe.
“It shows one of two things — Either he’s still taking performance-enhancing drugs to get the best out of him at his advanced age, or the ones he did take are still doing a fantastic job,” Dai Greene, Britain’s 2011 400m hurdles world champion said. “Because there is no way he can still be running that well at this late point in his career.
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“If you did it artificially, you don’t know how you did it,” Briton Darren Campbell, a former European 100m champion said.
Gatlin must have tremendous mental strength if he believes he could now do it clean.
— BBC
