Young stars strive to clean up track

The young stars of track and field, and one notorious older one, will gather for the U.S. championships in Indianapolis in a few days. Their sport is like a battered ship that seems to have weathered the worst of the storm.

While its athletes are subject to the most intensive testing in sports, track’s drug-stained image is not erased easily. Suspicions inevitably linger in competitions built on speed, strength and endurance.

“You’re going to have to live a number of years with the stigma of what happened before,” said Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency. “That’s just the price you pay for the sins of the past.”

As is often the case, the hope is in the young.

Across the globe, especially in the United States, a wave of new talent has emerged, insisting it is drug-free, even relishing the role of the sport’s salvation.

“We have a lot of young athletes – Jeremy Wariner, Sanya Richards, Allyson Felix – who are running world-class times, proving to the world there’s no need for those cloudy allegations anymore,” Justin Gatlin said. “We’re trying to bring the sunshine back to track and field.”

The 24-year-old Gatlin – Olympic 100-meter gold medalist in Athens and reigning world 100 and 200 champion – is the face of U.S. track now. He’s also half of what could prove to be one of the greatest sprint rivalries in the sport’s history.

He and Jamaican Asafa Powell share track’s most coveted world record, in the 100, a mark of 9.77 seconds. Powell set the record last year, Gatlin tied it this year, then Powell tied it again.

It is the stuff that finally could edge the sport back into the headlines, even in this usually quiet year halfway between Olympics.

But track has a way of stumbling over its own spikes. Agents and promoters have squabbled over proposed showdowns between the two. The only matchup so far on this year’s schedule for the world’s two fastest humans is July 28 at the London Grand Prix.

Gatlin seems comfortable in his role, and meets critics head-on. His coach is Trevor Graham, whose former pupils include Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery. Several athletes coached by Graham have been suspended for doping. Graham also sent a vial of the then-undetectable designer steroid THG to authorities, tipping them off to the latest substance in the cheaters’ arsenal.

Gatlin also served a two-year ban from international competition while in college because of a drug he was taking for attention deficit disorder.

“With what happened way back in college and the coach I have now, I know that my career will always be shrouded with this allegation,” he said. “It’s something I’ve grown to live with, something that keeps me fighting as an athlete, helping other sprinters and other youth come along and try to steer track and field in the right direction.”

Craig Masback, executive director of USA Track & Field, describes Gatlin as an athlete “who gets it.”

“He’s got the opportunity to do everything right,” Masback said. “I don’t want to name them, but we’ve had people who had great athletic talent but for one reason or another made decisions that alienated them from the press or the public or both.”

Gatlin knows that if he tests positive, he will go from hero to hypocrite.

“My head’s on the chopping block,” he said.

That would be true of a flock of U.S. youngsters who helped bring a record gold medal haul of 14 at last year’s world championships in Finland.

“Justin Gatlin, Lauryn Williams, myself, Bershawn Jackson, all those young athletes, I think people know that we’re all clean,” said the 21-year-old Richards, runner-up in the world 400 last year. “I think if we continue to run as well as we’re running, and keep pushing a clean sport, I think that old image will be gone.”

Those athletes implicated as part of the federal probe of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative won’t be competing in Indianapolis. Most have retired, including the former world 100 record holder Montgomery, who quit after losing an appeal. He was suspended for four years based on BALCO evidence, although he never tested positive.

Then there is Montgomery’s former girlfriend, Marion Jones, the darling of track and field before the BALCO scandal broke.

Never implicated but dogged by suspicion and the damning accusations of others, Jones has not given up the sport she once dominated, even as her lucrative Nike deal expired and some meet promoters refused to let her run.

U.S. track officials might have wished she had stayed away, but Jones is back and will run in Indy. Jones, 30, has run the 100 in 11.06 twice this year, the last time earlier this month in New York, where she was mostly cheered by fans. It’s the fourth-fastest time in the world this year. Among Americans, only Felix has run faster.