Flashes of Panic

Have you ever seen an event go sour before it even happens?

The Freihofer’s Run for Women, an all-female 5K in Albany, has been the USA championship for that distance for several years, and consequently invited only American elite athletes. This year, the championship is elsewhere, and Freihofer’s started assembling an international field. I lined up some work for myself and made plans to be in attendance.

It started looking pretty hot, after several announcements, and last week we started seeing names of athletes like Lornah Kiplagat, who has covered the distance faster than any other woman alive. (For some inexplicable reason, she’s not credited with the world record, but that’s a discussion which will have your brain gnawing its way out, so I’ll leave it for another time.)

One hitch: one of the athletes prominently mentioned was former 10K world record holder Asmae Legzhaoui (say “Leg-ZOW-ie”; like fellow Moroccan Said Aouita, she scores big on the vowels-to-consonants scale, with extra points for using all five unambiguous vowels.)

Legzhaoui was busted for doping (with EPO, specifically) in 2002, and hit with a two-year ban, but now, on her return, that hasn’t been mentioned very much. In fact, the press materials from Albany haven’t mentioned it at all; her agent is calling it a “maternity break.” (While it’s true that Legzhaoui had a child during the period of the ban, she wouldn’t have been competing even if she hadn’t.)

This made me pretty uncomfortable. I write for outlets that cater to fans of the sport, and I do best when I can write something dramatic about an athlete who did something dramatic. I can’t be anything but tepid about an athlete who’s been busted for doping. I was hoping to myself that she wouldn’t win, and I could do my work pretending she wasn’t there.

Over the weekend, Kiplagat withdrew from the race, saying she would not participate in a race where Legzhaoui was an invited guest. (Presumably she would race Legzhaoui if the latter paid her own entry fee and travel expenses.) Another Kenyan woman also represented by Kiplagat’s agent/husband also withdrew, and word is that Benita Johnson, an Australian who won the 2004 World Cross Country championships, is out as well (though that hasn’t been officially confirmed.)

Here’s where I start saying things I can’t say when I’m speaking for anyone but myself. There was a very long and rambling article about the “scandal” on runnersworld.com today, “reported” by the sometimes-incoherent Toby Tanser. It’s very heavy reading, running very long and apparently unedited except for a quick pass through a spell-check. (If I was trying to project a professional atmosphere, I would’ve cut it by half, removing the sentences which don’t make sense, imposed some organization on the arguments, and attempted to feign impartiality.) Tanser is very close to Kiplagat’s camp, and the story is slanted heavily against Legzhaoui. He mentioned, disapprovingly, one Moroccan agent who said…

He has no problem with people like Asmae running races because they were suspended and can’t be punished the rest of their life. However, he said they should not treat them like heroes because they don’t deserve this.

I’m really, really worried about this now, because the athletes who are withdrawing are the ones who stood a good chance of beating Legzhaoui. There are others who still might, but as more withdraw, we may be left with the pariah as the favorite, much like the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton (my second, and last, Worlds) where the Russian Olga Yegorova was cleared for competition despite failing an EPO test earlier in the summer.

I tend to agree with the agent: once the athlete has served the ban, they should have the chance to compete again. But a lot of the image of drug-free athletics is built around trust, and once we’ve been burned by an athlete, it’s hard to trust them again. I continue to hope someone other than Legzhaoui wins on Saturday in Albany; I do not want to write about her as if she’s a hero; nor do I want to read others attempting to gloss over her ugly past.

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