Olympic Runners

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http://www.ti****nline.co.uk/tol/spo...cle4009370.ece

From The Times
May 26, 2008

Graham drug cheats show no remorse in court

Friends, Olympians, champions of the world ... this was the cast in the San Francisco court case that may close today, athletes who soared to great heights and who have now been dragged on their bellies through the dirt as the methods that got them to the peak have been revealed in all their mendacity. Do athletes feel the slightest remorse when they take illegal performance-enhancing drugs? Not on the evidence here. But does it hurt when your cheating is revealed? Oh boy, does it hurt.

We were here for the trial of Trevor Graham, the coach of the celebrated cheats, Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin. He has been charged with lying to federal agents, though a week's worth of evidence here would suggest that many of his world-leading group, the acclaimed Sprint Capitol team of Raleigh, North Carolina, could win world titles for lying too.

And yet when it came to telling the truth it was possible to feel a glimmer of sympathy for Antonio Pettigrew (one Olympic gold, four World Championship golds) as prosecution lawyers extracted from him the brutal truth of his four-year programme on banned drugs, stripping away the layers of respect until he was naked, devastated, and acknowledging that it was time to “face the consequences”.

The kind of consequences were plain for all to see when Jerome Young, his former training partner and team-mate on numerous 4x400 metres relay teams, told the court that his job these days was driving a delivery truck. Young, like Pettigrew, had been a World Championship and Olympic gold medal-winner. As he said: “I was a big name before I got in trouble.”

Pettigrew was left to ponder what would happen to his job as a high-ranked track coach, or his ability to support his young family, or how the world might reassess him. And when he made his slow exit from the courtroom, he may as well have been walking the plank. He was pursued by journalists, but uttered not a word.

The dynamics of the courtroom were fascinating. Here was Pettigrew testifying against Graham, to whose daughter he is godfather. Likewise we had Dennis Mitchell, four times the US 100metres champion, explaining how Graham let him stay in his house for months and now joining the testimony against the coach, explaining how Graham had himself twice injected him with human growth hormone .

Note that they were not driven here by a desire to hurt their former coach, but by subpoena notices and the knowledge that lying was a criminal offence. Yet while Graham offered these men friendship, he also presented them with a deal where the pressure to accept was huge. “If you want to run 9.8 [you need to] do these things,” is what Mitchell said he told him.

“I want to be the best sprinter in the world and break the world record,” Garfield Ellenwood, another from Sprint Capitol, told him when he was wide-eyed and new to the camp. And Graham allegedly replied: “If you want to get to the next level, there are some things you have to do.”

All the five runners who testified here suggested that they were clean before they joined up with Graham. They all told a similar story about how Graham would pull them to one side and whisper into their ear that they needed chemical help and that he knew the man who could provide it.

“Give me $150 [about £75] and I'll take care of the rest,” is how Ellenwood recalled his initiation. Sure enough, a package arrived at Ellenwood's house a few days later with some vials of the steroid dianabol and some advice from Graham on how to ice the injection area before inserting the syringe.

One conscientious objector was Duane Ross. Yet even though Ross said that he did not fancy the testosterone that Graham said he needed, he nevertheless got a phone call out of the blue from Angel Heredia, Graham's dealer, informing him: “If you want to run fast and make money, this is what you need.”

Ross said that he bought legal supplements from Heredia, but that the Mexican's packages would also contain steroids , like freebie tasters, some of them unmarked, that he would stow away under his kitchen sink. He also said that his reluctance to take drugs was the ending of his relationship with Graham.

Graham, it appeared in court, would often check in training that his athletes were “taking what you need”. “If you weren't in line with what was going on you were an outcast,” Ross said.

The surprise was that at trackside in Raleigh no one raised even the slightest ethical doubt, they just followed Graham's instructions. The two who did resist, Ross and Ellenwood, both explained that their resistance was the fear of testing positive, not the fact that being positive might be wrong.

As the list of the discredited has stretched ever longer, the hope for anyone with any affinity for the sport has been that the Graham case might mark an end to the damaging retrospection. A slim hope it proved to be.

For when the jury is done and the case is settled, there are other areas of concern, other names to follow, and, for starters, another 11 names on the client list of Heredia allegedly still to be revealed. True enough, we cannot really believe much that Heredia says, but if the San Francisco court case proved anything, it is that we cannot really believe anyone else either.

A couple things I really dont get, why would sprinters and runners use dianabol? That would be the last thing that I would use if I was a runner

They also were injecting Dbol ...

[sevenmann]

no kidding , injectable Dbol ? ? ? ? hmmmmmm

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Injectable dbol is real, but rare. Only thing is that I dont know why they would use Dbol for runners....

[inheritmylife]

Injectable dbol is real, but rare. Only thing is that I dont know why they would use Dbol for runners....

Powerful androgen. Makes you feel like you're the shit. That's what makes the best the best, confidence.

[Roidal]

I can't wait to watch the Men's 100m, it's going to be fun