Exploring Justin Gatlin’s Latest Controversy
Justin Gatlin has once again become deeply embedded in a doping controversy… but before we begin I should probably say I am by no means a Justin Gatlin supporter and have been extremely critical of his actions in the past; but I want to approach this fresh controversy with a fresh take. If found guilty by an ensuing investigation this would be his third strike which (as of now) would result in a permanent ban from the sport. Now, Is he already guilty in the court of public opinion? that is what I am here to explore today.
The Company You Keep
This latest round of doping allegations comes from across the pond when reporters tied to The Telegraph seemed to have caught Justin Gatlin’s agent Robert Wagner discussing how he can get HGH and Testoterone prescriptions in his own name before smuggling them to the US for his athletes of which he later implicated Gatlin when he pulled the reporter aside, “you think Justin isn’t doing it? you think every other track athlete isn’t doing it?”. It seems as though Wagner thinks this is just the price of admission to competing at the elite level. According to The Telegraph there is also a $250,000 actual price of admission through an Austrian doctor to obtain the substances.
Dennis Mitchell (Gatlin’s coach and former Olympian) is also on camera in the investigation but to me he kind of gets the raw end of this deal. Wagner is on camera bragging about the lengths he can go to cheat the sport while Mitchell is pretty adamant that his athletes don’t “mess with the stuff”. He did explain how they go about getting IV’s and b12 injections but as far as we know that is all by the book. It leaves you wondering if there is more to this story then what is currently available. Are investigators leaving out a key piece of this evidence for later or is Dennis Mitchell just the sacrificial lamb for Justin Gatlin to get out ahead of this story. It is worth noting that Dennis Mitchell has a doping history and was a key witness in the BALCO investigation… so I get it that he isn’t the most upstanding coach but this also makes him an easy scapegoat for the rest of Gatlin’s camp. It is possible that there is more to this story than what we are getting currently but what I did take away from Mitchell’s statements on camera is that even if his athletes aren’t doping (and he seemed pretty genuine to me at least) he knows perfectly well how other athletes are getting away with it.
Gatlin’s First Strike*
So if evidence leads to Gatlin being found guilty this will be the third and final strike against him but I want to talk about his first two strikes and why this shouldn’t actually be considered his 3rd strike.
While in college Gatlin received a 1 year doping ban for having an ADD medication in his system. This was a medication that had recently been added to the banned substances list but at the time Gatlin had been taking Adderal for a decade and legitimately had been diagnosed with ADD. Gatlin wasn’t taking the drug during competition since he said, “it made him feel sluggish” and ultimately USADA even agreed that “Mr. Gatlin never cheated nor intended to cheat”.
So the conclusion is that strike 1 should not have been strike 1… but strike 2 is not defensible. Gatlin has tried to claim that he was sabotaged and has not been repentant what-so-ever. He was found guilty by USADA and given a 4 year ban from the sport — and even if he didn’t know what pills he was being given… he was still associating with another convicted doper in his coach Travis Graham (who was also the coach of Marion Jones) and should have been more cautious.
As an American I want to give Gatlin the benefit of the doubt but I also believe his past history makes it impossible to do so. Without further knowledge of a USADA or WADA investigation I am torn on how to absorb this news… but I guess we’ll just have to wait as another member of team USA is put through the wringer.
What do you think? Are we jumping to conclusions? or is Gatlin guilty by association?
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>I'm exploring Justin Gatlin's possible 3rd(*) strike and latest controversy in tonight's blog post. What do you think about it? <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/runchat?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#runchat</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/tracknation?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#tracknation</a></p>— Justin Horneker (@hornekerjustin) <a href=”https://twitter.com/hornekerjustin/status/943273115500580865?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 20, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset=”utf-8"></script>
Happy Running,
Justin
