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Greene stays clean

Doping scandal tarnishes his competitors

By By Patrick Shehan

Wednesday, April 20, 2005



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When Maurice Greene walks into Memorial Stadium Saturday to compete in the Kansas Relays, he’ll have a crowd behind him. Not because of his roots in Kansas City, Kan. Not because of his dominance at the Kansas Relays in the past. In the midst of BALCO accusations and steroid scandals, Maurice Greene is the easiest man to root for. In the witch hunt known as the BALCO trials, Greene’s name has been cleared.

That cannot be said of world-record holder Tim Montgomery. Greene accomplished what he set out to do: Claim the title of the world’s fastest man. Montgomery beat Greene’s record on September 14, 2002 in Paris, France.

“I am the fastest man to ever run the 100 meters,” Montgomery said after the race.

What he failed to mention were his meetings two years earlier with BALCO president Victor Conte, who now drops names to share the guillotine. Montgomery was a product of Conte’s campaign to build the world’s fastest man. Whether Montgomery knew he was on THG, a substance banned from sports, should not be in question.

In a period of sports where baseball elites are considering attaching asterisks to the records of such names as Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, the same system can be applied to track. Placing an asterisk next to a name simply exposes the corruption within a sport.

An asterisk does more than place the blame on the crooked. It justifies the athletes who dominated the sport before such corruption. The records of Babe Ruth and Willie Mays could be restored. And Maurice Greene should be next.

There’s no doubt that when Montgomery crossed that finish line in Paris, he received help from the BALCO lab. In the next Guinness World Records, an asterisk needs to be placed next to Montgomery’s name.

Greene earned the title of world’s fastest man. He wept when he watched Donovan Bailey win the race at the 1996 Olympic games that should have been his for the taking. He trained with H.S.I., a sports management company, created by attorney Emmanuel Hudson. Originally derived from “Hudson Sports Incorporated,” the phrase blended into the term, “Handling Speed Intelligently.”

With training partners such as Ato Boldon and Jon Drummonds, Greene whittled down the world record by five-tenths of a second.

He ran the 100-meter dash in 9.79 seconds at Athens in 1999. He even came to the Kansas relays in 2000 shortly after achieving the record. Training with some of track’s elite athletes, Greene shattered the 100-meter dash record with years of effort and training. Not by using THG.

Before the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, Greene testified against the current method of testing athletes. He commented that the games in Sydney would help sort out the cheats. He couldn’t wait until the time came when testing could finally be effective in keeping steroids out of the oldest sport in history. It may have come later than the 2000 Olympic games, but the truth has finally been exposed.

In a sport where the elite athletes are ridiculed because of performance-enhancing drugs, Maurice Greene stands above the accusations that have led to the demise of other track stars. When he competes in the Gold Zone on Saturday, it will be a chance to see sport in its truest form.

Despite the state of BALCO accusations, one can find such purity in Greene.

Shehan is a Denver sophomore in journalism.
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