Brennan: Don't feel sorry that Usain Bolt is losing an Olympic gold medal
The focus of the latest Olympic doping scandal is on Usain Bolt. Of course it is. He’s the rock star in the story, the first sprinter in history to win three gold medals at three consecutive Olympic Games, only to learn after the fact that he has done it only twice.
Because his Jamaican relay teammate, Nesta Carter, was found to have cheated when the International Olympic Committee went back and reanalyzed hundreds of urine samples from the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the whole Jamaican team — including Bolt — was stripped of its gold medals Wednesday.
Because Bolt is so famous, the sports world’s knee-jerk reaction probably is to feel a little sorry for him. He wasn’t caught cheating. His teammate was. Yet he loses one of his Olympic gold medals anyway. Those are the rules; if one teammate cheats, he or she takes the whole relay down with them.
You can feel a touch of sympathy for Bolt if you’d like, but I won’t. Rather, I’d like to know if Bolt knew Carter was cheating.
Performance-enhancing drugs have ravaged our faith and trust in Olympic sports for more than 40 years now. While that assuredly bothers spectators, organizers and sponsors, it really irks the athletes who are competing clean and must go up against those who are not.
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Those clean athletes know. They know who’s cheating. Sometimes the suspicions become so obvious that they can’t help themselves from talking about it in public. Those athletes, people like swimmers Shirley Babashoff, Janet Evans and Lilly King, are the true heroes of sports’ Steroids Era.
So, if Bolt knew Carter was doping, why didn’t he speak up? Cynically, we know why. What teammate would speak up and kill his or her chances for an Olympic gold medal? The very rare one, that’s who.
If you want to feel sorry for anyone in this saga, your sympathy would be much better placed with the second-place finishers in the men’s 4x100 relay in Beijing, the sprinters from Trinidad and Tobago. Or the third-place team from Japan. Or, better yet, the fourth-place finishers, Brazil.
A regal Olympic medal ceremony often is the peak of a young athlete’s life. All those years of training, and, finally, a celebration of victory. Because Carter chose to cheat, the runners from Trinidad and Tobago and Japan were deprived of their rightful places on the medal podium.
And the poor Brazilians? They were left on the sidelines to watch a ceremony that they should have been in. They never got a chance to stand on the third rung of the podium, to watch their flag be raised in the Bird’s Nest, to swell with pride in front of thousands with a medal around their necks.
Instead, sometime in the next few weeks, packages will arrive at their doors, and when they open them, they will each find an Olympic medal. Perhaps they will be alone. Perhaps a friend or family member will be with them.
They assuredly will take the medal out of the box and put it around their neck. Hundreds of photographers will not be there to record the moment. Nor will thousands of fans. The public joy they should have felt more than eight years ago will be reduced to private exhilaration.
Perhaps they’ll take a selfie.
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