Flashes of Panic

A week later, and I haven’t said a word about what nearly everyone else in the sports-journalism world has already weighed in about. Last Saturday I went to pick up my number for the half-marathon and on to the New England open cross-country meet listening to NPR coverage of Marion Jones. I’ve been reading columns about her all week.

I don’t really have much to say, not that anyone is asking. I’m annoyed, to be sure; I come back, in my mind, to the meet where I (and most of the other reporters on hand) missed watching Meseret Defar run a world record in the women’s 5,000m because we were in a press conference listening to first Justin Gatlin and then Jones tell us how clean they were. (N.B. This would be annoying even if Gatlin and Jones were clean.) But that’s nothing; I didn’t write the book on Jones or anything like that. I’ve never lost out on a medal, a national championships, or prize money because I was running against an athlete who was doping.

I’m not shocked; I, too, have been hearing the rumors since Jones burst on the scene ten years ago, coincidentally at the first USATF championship I attended as a reporter. I’m disappointed. I’m resigned. And I’m… tired.

I’m so tired of having to wonder what I’m seeing; of having a great performance clouded by questions about how it was reached. Just the thought sucks the thrill out of a meet like a sudden drop in cabin pressure, leaving us all gasping.

When you come right down to it, I’ve never been entirely sold on the idea that sprinters are really part of my sport. Marion Jones has as little to do with the sport I participate in as Mia Hamm—maybe less. This is willful naivite on my part, because the general public doesn’t see “distance running” as significantly different from the greater sport of “athletics” (track and field, in this country.) Marion Jones, Adam Nelson, Paul Tergat: all on the same team, as far as the general public is concerned. And while I would be shocked and dismayed if either Nelson or Tergat were busted for doping, I’m sure both have been accused by someone, somewhere, simply because they’re so good. (Tergat, of course, would be accused of a different agent entirely; steroids like Jones used are less useful to distance runners than blood-boosting agents like EPO.)

I’m limited, I think, by the way I write about the sport, or more correctly, the way I don’t write about it. I’ve said before that I come to this subsection of journalism as a fan with a notebook, and the writing I do, usually event reports or athlete profiles, necessarily starts with a premise that athletes are clean until proven (or confessed) dirty, and that competition happens only within the constraints described in the official rules. Removing the sport from those borders removes the sport. Also, I tend to assume that my audience knows the sport a bit; they know what covering ten kilometers (or twenty, or forty-two) on foot feels like, etc.

It’s a narrow little window I look at my sport through, and it’s really too small to give me much to say about Jones.

Lauryn Williams, on the other hand. She has something to say, and it’s worth reading. I’ll stop now.

Now Playing: Bang And Blame from Monster by R.E.M.

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