But what I really want to know is how you could be unaware that you were the only person on your relay team not on "the stuff"? How does anyone know what another person does behind closed doors? In this day & age, it seems as if no athlete can perform well anymore because the better an athlete does, the more under the microscope they become. I sure miss the days when, let's say, a professional baseball player would hit a home run and everyone would be in awe of the distance that the ball would travel. Now, if the same player hits one out of the park with the same distance, people would assume that something shady is going on. Nothing is held as sacred in sports anymore and IMO, that's exactly what we're missing. The innocence of it all....or maybe I'm just being naive.
There is a difference between not knowing what a person does behind closed doors, and being one person on a four man relay team, whom you train and travel with, spend a good deal of time in close proximity to, and with at least one of them, are best friends. You can call it naive, as Johnson does. Or if you're me, you call it being obtuse and willfully ignorant. It's not like we are talking about having no knowledge that a co-worker is a foot fetishist, or is a parrot-head and goes to Jimmy Buffett concerts dressed as a salt shaker. This is three athletes on a four man relay team that kept their use of performance enhancers from the one remaining member. Please forgive me if I seem skeptical.
Agreed, lbb. I wasn't necessarily addressing any of the potential "punishments." I was simply applauding the fact that Johnson basically faced the truth and handed the medal back, rather than pounding his fists and screaming about his innocence. Like the article said, there could have been a drawn out protest on his part, but he chose to keep what was left of that relay team's integrity. (I guess I am less skeptical than THX about his ignorance of his teammate's actions.)
Please forgive me if I seem skeptical. Your forgiven.
Thanks ghost. For further explanation of my cynical and dour attitude about the world and all it's vile denizens, please see the Bavasi thread.
May be easy for him to do given the slew of other medals he has, but it's still the right answer. That victory is no longer his or any of his teammates. so even if he is/was the fastest man alive, there's no way he could have won that particular competition by himself. Not the fastest man in the world. Not then. Sorry if I'm being petty (and that wasn't what you were alluding too), but that one really stuck in the ol' craw. The only case in Olympic History where NBC started crowning the winner of the 200m as "fastest". Pissed me off then. Pisses me off now.
a quote from Johnson deeply disappointed in Antonio and in the sport of athletics furthermore, his favorite form of writing is literature, and he is fascinated by the governmental form of politics. That's the IOC's traditional name for "track and field" On topic: He did the right thing. Which is also, frequently, the difficult thing.
Mea Culpa. I've never heard anyone else refer to it that way, so I had no idea. I'm just going to head to the boys' room now and wash a little egg off my face!
