Over the next 4 days, the best T&F athletes in the
country will compete for a spot to represent Team USA at the IAAF World
Championships in Beijing. While I believe that most of these athletes are engaging
in our sport with integrity, I cannot say the same for our governing body.
To be fair, I have seen some great strides over the last
couple of years. You are showing many more races live, for free, on USATF.tv.
You’ve helped support a quality High Performance meet with Hoka One One (that
sadly had to be cancelled by freak weather). Your social media has done an
amazing job keeping us fans informed about Team USA athletes all around the
globe. There is certainly much to be proud of.
But there is also much that causes disgust. Specifically,
your lack of integrity when it comes to cheating in our sport. Right now the
buzz is all around the Nike Oregon Project, but we need not get into the
details here. Regardless of the truth of the allegations, your position on
cheating has been laughable. In fact, I cannot find a single word about this on
your News archive or social media accounts. I greatly appreciate that you – through the words of CEO Max Siegal – are willing to speak up about other injustices, but am just
baffled that you, as the governing body for T&F in the USA, are unwilling
to speak up about injustices in our sport.
Of course, we don’t expect you to take sides on the breaking
issue at hand. But why not at least acknowledge the issue and stand by the
principles of clean sport? That should be true regardless of where the facts in
this particular case may lead. You should be engaged with these important
issues around the sport that you govern, instead of, as it seems, trying to let
them slip by.
Instead, your actions throughout my years following the
sport lead me to believe that you think issues of cheating are irrelevant if
not actively occurring. I realize that, in many circumstances, you must allow
convicted cheaters to compete when their bans are up, per WADA and IAAF, but
you need not give them special privileges. And yet you do.
As best I can tell, there were two relay events this year
in which you had at least some discretionary power in selecting athletes to represent
Team USA. Those two events were:
Despite not being required by your published selection
procedure, you chose to have us all be represented by convicted cheaters. While
you may be forced to do so at the upcoming IAAF World Championships due to
international rules, that was not the case here. For whatever reason, you
thought that our country was best represented by individuals who have been
convicted of breaking the rules of fair sport.
You clearly and unapologetically rewarded individuals who
have been convicted of cheating.
And it’s not just the current athletes. You've let known cheaters into the official USATF coaching ranks. Even
if a coach is truly the best in that particular discipline, shouldn’t selection
of a coach involve more than merely technical expertise?
What sort of message is being sent when you purposely select
known and convicted drug cheats for international competition, or give them publicaccolades for their performances? What is the purpose of our governing body? Is
it merely to win medals, or is it to compete with integrity and honor? I’d like
to think our sport is about more than merely medals and money.
Don’t get me wrong; you have done a lot of good for our
sport, and I’m confident that you will continue to do so. And I recognize that our
sport, at least as it seems to me, is one of the few that actively tries to
catch cheaters and clean itself up. Yet it is in this area that you seem to be falling
short.
But you can turn things around.
You have the power to not only make
the USA the worldwide leader in medal hauls and world rankings, but also the
worldwide leader of competing with integrity.
Do it for you, do it for the fans, do it for the sport. Just
do it.
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