The Awesome Responsibility

A little over a week ago, Tyson Gay ran the greatest single-meet double in the history of sprinting at the U.S. Championships. Here's how USATF described his accomplishment:

Gay won the men's 100 meters in a meet-record 9.84 seconds on Friday. Running into a headwind of 0.5mps, the time is the fastest in the world this year and the second-fastest ever run into a headwind, 2000 Olympic gold medalist Maurice Greene having run 9.82 into a -0.2 headwind at the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton. Gay put on another impressive display Sunday in the 200, winning in 19.62 seconds (0.3 meters-per-second headwind), the #2 time ever, behind only Michael Johnson's world record of 19.32 from the 1996 Olympics.

Tyson Gay - 9.84 100m at U.S. Championships
Tyson Gay - 19.62 200m at U.S. Championships

I watched the 200 final, and I found it awe-inspiring -- literally, an experience that made me feel "awe" in the sense of "...an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by...the sacred or sublime."

I think most serious spectators watch Track and Field for a combination of three reasons: PLEASURE in watching the near-perfect form of world-class athletes, EXCITEMENT for the high level of competition at meets, and AWE at seeing the seemingly impossible take place before one's eyes.

AWE is the most powerful emotion, and the one that I associate most closely with my own love of the sport. There is something about watching human beings go beyond their own limits and those of humankind that makes me believe that I, too, can aspire to do more than I have done before. As the word implies, there is something dreadful about such performances, something that speaks of a power greater than the ones you have known before.

A few days after the U.S. Championships, an article appeared in the Washington Times titled "On a fast track to a Life of Doubt." Written by Dan Daly, The article posed the question of why Tyson's Gay's feats had received (relatively) little attention, and answered the question by claiming that "...the sport has been on life support since Sept. 27, 1988, the day Johnson was stripped of his 100-meter gold medal at the Seoul Olympics after flunking a drug test."

I found the article troubling for a number of reasons. First, it failed to offer the two obvious reasons that Tyson Gay isn't the household name that Carl Lewis was twenty years ago. The first is that there is far less mainstream coverage of Track and Field than there used to be. The second is that Tyson Gay is, by all accounts, a fairly quiet guy who prefers to let his results speak for him -- quite different from the mercurial Lewis or subsequent claimants for the title of world's fastest human.

More seriously, the article hinted that Gay, or any athlete who produced an awesome performance was immediately under suspicion for using illegal means to achieve their results. In effect, Daly was denying the ability of track and field to create that sense of awe, of wonder, that is so valued by those of us who love the sport. Writing on Finish Line Pundit, Jimmie Markham excoriated Daly for this unfair attack on a superb athlete and on the entire sport. Markham pointed out that Athletics is probably more serious about addressing the issue of illegal performance-enhancing substances than any other sport.

But the other reason Daly's article was disturbing to me personally is that I remember Ben Johnson's race, and I remember feeling a similar awe watching him blow away one of the greatest 100m sprint field in history. I was watching the race live with a friend, and we were both overwhlemed at having seen something impossible, unthinkable. I had never been much a sprint fan before that race, but I couldn't get the image of Johnson's start out of my mind. I had wanted Lewis to win, but by the time Johnson crossed the finish line, 9.79 seconds after the start of the race, I was sure that the better runner had won.

Ben Johnson - WC in Rome 1987, OG in Seoul 1988

When Johnson tested positive, I mourned. All the sublime feelings generated by watching a man burst the limits of human potential had been replaced by a complex mess of confusion and a sense of having been duped. It is, unfortunately, a feeling I have experienced since.

I wish I could conclude with a hopeful thought, or a glib resolution, but I can't. It seems to me that the work of keeping Track and Field viable by keeping it clean is long and tedious, requiring patience, judgment, and a willingness to go beyond simplistic solutions. Athletes, officials, reporters, and fans all bear responsibility -- an awesome responsibility -- for supporting testing and sanctions, but also for rejecting the easy storyline of "if it's that good, it must be tainted."