Justin Gatlin gets faster with age
but trust fails to keep pace
By Sean Ingle
Sunday 17 May 2015 22.00 BST (TheGuardian.com)American sprinter is defying biology and history by running a personal best aged 33 and doubts about his performances will not go away
Justin Gatlin won’t apologise for his past offences. He believes he has done nothing wrong. Photograph: David HumphriesMoments after pulverising a high-class field in Doha, Justin Gatlin turned his fingers into pistols and smiled as he pretended to shoot at the TV cameras. “I wanted to make a statement to the world,” he said. Whatever you think of the American, it was hard to argue and it was also some statement. At 33, Gatlin had run 100m in 9.74sec, not only a personal best but the joint-ninth fastest time in history. And in May, when most athletes are still shaking off the last of their spring rust.
A few hours earlier Sebastian Coe, who is hoping to become the IAAF’s president, had made a stiffer, more formal statement in Doha. Athletics, he warned, needed to restructure its calendar and improve how it presented itself to become more compelling. He was right. But the reaction to Gatlin’s victory suggests the sport faces a more pressing issue: one of trust.
On Twitter Jo Pavey reckoned it was “terrible to have such a bad role model leading an event” while the British 400m runner Conrad Williams suggested: “The only legal thing about Gatlin’s win is the +0.9 wind.”
Can you imagine such a reaction from top tennis stars after watching a fellow player hit a miraculous scrambling winner? Or in football, following a weaving run past half a dozen opponents? Of course that is partly because we know more about cheating in athletics – its drug testing, while imperfect, is better than in most sports. But with Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic 100m champion who was banned for doping from 2006-10, the doubts are sounded so frequently they become almost like a form of tinnitus.
Is Gatlin doping? That is the question so many ask but few can answer. But we can certainly say this – he is defying biology and history. Sprinters are supposed to peak in their mid- to late-20s. Of the seven athletes who have run 9.80 or quicker Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake ran their fastest 100m aged 22, Asafa Powell and Nesta Carter were 25. Tyson Gay 27. Steve Mullings 28. Yet Gatlin looks stronger and faster than ever.
Ross Tucker, the professor of exercise physiology at University of the Free State in South Africa, puts it this way: “Gatlin has a peculiar longevity. Even if he hadn’t doped we would be still be saying his recent times were unusual. Say doping is worth 2% to performance – and that is a conservative estimate. Then factor in being six years away from his peak, which is another couple of percent off his very best. Yet he has still found a way to improve.”
Some of those I have spoken to in the sport, especially in the US, are prepared to believe in Gatlin. They point out he has passed every test since his return, that his technique and biomechanics have improved along with his nutrition. And that fast times in a person’s 30s are not unprecedented. After all, Bruny Surin and Powell ran 9.84 at 32 while Linford Christie set his personal best of 9.87 at 33. And Gatlin insists he is clean.
His agent, Renaldo Nehemiah, told me last year: “No matter what he says, there will be doubters. That’s the world we live in. Wada and Usada have full access to him whenever they choose to test him. Aside from that, there’s nothing more he can do. He’ll never please or satisfy everyone. All of the other distractions, critics and haters, will always be there. He can only account for himself.”
It is the case that – as David Epstein, the author of The Sports Gene, points out – the “expiration” age of athletes is a little higher than thought. “I recently saw research into the bone density in Cirque du Soleil performers and it completely defies the medical expectation of decline starting in the 30s,” he says. “In fact it wasn’t declining for some of the performers in their 50s. And Michael Johnson set the 400m world record just short of his 32nd birthday.”
That said, Epstein believes that on the balance of probabilities Gatlin could potentially be benefiting from his past drug use. He cites two studies, including one by a team of Swedish researchers in 2006 that examined the impact of anabolic steroid use on powerlifters years after they had ceased taking drugs. It found that while physical traces of the drug no longer remained, changes in their shoulders and quadriceps still gave those lifters an advantage.
But what is to be done? Life bans have been tried. Because of legal issues they didn’t work. It hardly inspires confidence when Gatlin works with Dennis Mitchell, who was banned in 1998 after a test found high testosterone levels in his body. His defence? That he had “five bottles of beer and sex with his wife at least four times – it was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat”. Or that Gatlin remains so unrepentant about his past.
At the world relays earlier this month Tyson Gay, another doper, said: “I ask for forgiveness for a mistake.” Gatlin, though, won’t apologise. He believes he has done nothing wrong. Because his first offence – caused by medicine for attention-deficit disorder which he had been taking since the age of eight – was overturned. And the excessive testosterone in his system which led to a ban in 2006 was put there, without his knowledge, by a masseuse.
But every time Gatlin runs so quickly he asks everyone to make a leap of faith. To believe that he is faster than ever at 33 while also being drug-free. Given his past, he can have few qualms if so many people prefer to stay rooted to the spot.
