Why, Christian, Why?
by Savannah Cress
Gaining elite status in one’s chosen sport is the ultimate goal for many athletes. After all, most top runners enter a race with the objective of winning. When winning becomes a semi-regular thing, opportunities start to open up: sponsorship offers, championship meets, more clout, more fans, a larger income. With these perks come some less desirable obligations as well. To quote Mama Bear from The Berenstain Bears (my absolute favorite book series as a kid), “With privilege comes responsibility.” Mama Bear gave this speech to Sister Bear prior to Sister heading out to her very first slumber party at Lizzy Bruin’s house. Apparently, US elite sprinter Christian Coleman could have benefited from Mama Bear’s lecture as well. Coleman’s consequences for disregarding his responsibility are far longer-lasting than Sister Bear’s, which consisted of helping clean up the Bruins’ disheveled post-party house. [3]
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Coleman, the 100m world champion, recently received a 2-year ban from competing due to missing, or not being available for, 3 doping tests within a 12-month period. Turns out, a responsibility of being one of the fastest runners to ever set foot on a track is having your name in the USADA’s Registered Testing Pool, or RTP. I was completely oblivious to the Registered Testing Pool’s existence before hearing of Coleman’s unfortunate situation. After a little research, I discovered the RTP is basically a list of accomplished athletes – roughly 60 to 75 of the best for US Track and Field – who can be drug tested, without any notice, 365 days a year. And make no mistake, the folks in charge of testing do not take holidays off. 2012 Olympic shot putter Chrstian Cantwell can attest to that. He has been drug tested on Thanksgiving day as well as while at the hospital for the birth of his son. Nothing says “Congratulations!!!” like a knock on your hospital door from a USADA doping-control officer…sheesh. [1] [2] [6]
But how in the world does the USADA drug-test athletes on any given day without any notice? How do they even know where to find everybody? Are we microchipping athletes now? No, not yet at least, although it could be argued that Coleman’s outcome would have been preferable if athletes were microchipped and located on GPS at the time of a sporadic test. What the USADA does is require those who are in the RTP to submit quarterly “Whereabouts” reports. These Whereabout reports document athletes’ overnight locations and where their regularly-scheduled events (school, training, other work) take place, as well as declare a specific location where the athlete will be for a 60-minute time frame every single day of that quarter. During those 60 minutes the USADA can come to that location and request a drug test, without any advanced notice. It is the athletes’ responsibility to make sure they are at that location when they said they would be in their quarterly report. As Coleman is finding out, even unintentional slip-ups in the administrative side of the testing/location process can result in career-altering effects. [4]
Personally, the thought of pinning down exactly where I will be each day and night for the following 3 months overwhelms me to no end. My initial gut reaction was that losing the ability to compete for 2 years, including the Tokyo Olympics, is a ridiculously harsh punishment for an athlete who has never failed a drug test and just wasn’t at the exact location that he said he would be 3 months earlier. Then I saw it. In typical, ever-creepy Google fashion, a well-timed ad banner rolls across my screen for a USADA Express Athlete Updater app. I click on it and discover the answer to all of Coleman’s problems. Yes he must submit the quarterly reports and declare which hour of every day he will be home and available for testing, but if things should change, it’s not a big huge paperwork situation; there’s an app for that. [5]
So really, elite athletes just have to do what I, and millions of other people with questionable short-term-memory retention do: plug the 1 hour time slot into his or her phone calendar and set it to repeat every day with ample alerts leading up to that hour. That’s the only way I make it anywhere I am supposed to be most days. And if something comes up and you end up at, hypothetically, a relay meet in Iowa last minute instead of at your home in Kentucky, click into the app and update your location for that day. It’s really rather simple, and I’m not sure I understand why Coleman, who was nearly banned the previous year for missing drug tests as well, has not figured out a system for this clearly important aspect of his job. Equally unadmirable was his failed attempt to shift the blame of the missed encounter onto the doping control officers, suggesting they left before the 60-minute window was up. He claimed that he arrived home during the 60-minute window, but after the officers had left, which, by the way, still would not fulfill his obligation to be at the location for the entire 60 minutes. When receipts from purchases made by Coleman during that time contradicted his claim of arriving home during the stated time slot, he complained that the testers had not called him to see where he was — had they called him, he could have just come home right then…which also would not have fulfilled his obligation to be at the stated location for the entire 60 minutes. [2] [7]
I’m seeing a bit of a recurring theme….a tendency that I have tried to squelch in my own children as it has cropped up, with varying levels of success: You, and nobody but you, are responsible for your choices and actions, or lack thereof. Who knows, maybe, for some personalities, it takes a natural consequence as grave as missing out on a once-every-4-years opportunity like the Olympics for that message to become ingrained in the mind. I guess we will see. Until then, we will miss watching Coleman compete in Tokyo. [2]
[1]https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/education/usadas-registered-testing-pool-notification-process/
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Berenstain-Bears-Slumber-Party/dp/0679804196
[4] https://www.usada.org/athletes/testing/whereabouts/
[5] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/usada-athlete-express-updater/id995370603
[6] https://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/08/23/olympic-drug-testing
[7]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/sports/olympics/christian-coleman-doping-olympics.html
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