Important Development for Tugboat* - Kibble and Bits to return !
Anton Berlin
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=ap-ath-jonesmedals-appeal
GENEVA (AP)—American sprinters who were stripped of their 2000
Olympics relay medals because teammate Marion Jones was doping won an
appeal Friday to have them restored.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled in favor of the women, who
had appealed the International Olympic Committee’s decision to
disqualify them from the Sydney Games.
The court said the IOC and International Association of Athletics
Federations rules in 2000 did not allow entire teams to be
disqualified because of doping by one athlete.
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The IOC said the ruling was “disappointing and especially unfortunate
for the athletes of the other teams who competed according to the
rules.”
In Sydney, Jearl Miles-Clark, Monique Hennagan, LaTasha Colander Clark
and Andrea Anderson were part of the squad that won gold in the 4x400
relay. Chryste Gaines, Torri Edwards, Nanceen Perry and Passion
Richardson were on the 4x100 bronze medal squad.
All but Perry joined the appeal.
“The panel found that at the time of the Sydney Olympic Games there
was no express IOC or IAAF rule in force that clearly allowed the IOC
to annul the relay team results if one team member was found to have
committed a doping offense,” CAS said.
Now that the case is over, Richardson can relax, her medal safe and
secure in a wooden frame at the home of her parents in Florida.
“It’s been a long three years, a long hard fight,” Richardson told The
Associated Press in a phone interview. “I wanted to believe they would
do what was right, but there were some times where I wasn’t as
certain. Today, they did what was right.”
Richardson spoke to Gaines and Miles-Clark and said that “everyone is
extremely excited.”
“Finally, the fight is over,” Richardson said.
In 2007, Jones admitted she was doping in Sydney and also lost her
individual golds in the 100 and 200 meters and bronze in the long
jump. She spent about six months in a Texas prison in 2008 for lying
about using performance-enhancing drugs and her role in a check-fraud
scam.
She has since made a comeback in basketball with the Tulsa Shock of
the WNBA.
“I’ve totally moved on,” Jones told The AP on Friday in San Antonio,
where the Shock were preparing to play the Silver Stars. “I’m moving
forward.”
Jones said she had not heard about the CAS decision and had not spoken
to her former Olympic teammates recently. She declined further
comment.
“She made some very poor choices. That’s something she has to live
with,” said Richardson, who no longer has any ill will toward her
former teammate. “We did what we were supposed to do and did it with
fairness. You have to learn to forgive and forget.”
The CAS panel of three lawyers acknowledged the ruling might be unfair
to relay teams that competed “with no doped athletes” but added the
decision “exclusively depends on the rules enacted or not enacted by
the IOC and the IAAF at the time of the Sydney Olympic Games.”
The CAS inflicted a further defeat on the IOC by ordering the Olympic
body to pay 10,000 Swiss francs ($9,500) toward the athletes’ legal
costs.
Mark Levinstein, the Washington, DC-based lead attorney for the
athletes, said there is still a lawsuit pending against the USOC.
“All they had to do was say, ‘The rules are the rules, leave them
alone,’ and this didn’t happen,” Levinstein said in a phone interview.
“To have your own national Olympic committee turn its back on you, it
was sad.”
The USOC issued a statement saying it respects the decision of the
CAS.
“Although we continue to believe that the U.S. medals in the 4x100 and
4x400 meter women’s relays were unfairly won due to Ms. Jones’ doping,
we have always recognized that the athletes who made up the U.S. teams
might have a legal basis on which to defend these medals,” said
Patrick Sandusky, chief communications officer for the USOC.
“We are sorry that Ms. Jones’ actions continue to have a negative
effect on the world of sport and express our sympathy for all of the
athletes who competed cleanly at the Olympic Games in Sydney and were
damaged by Ms. Jones’ poor decisions.”
United States Track and Field president Stephanie Hightower and CEO
Doug Logan said in a joint statement, “Although USATF was not a party
to this case, we are sympathetic to any clean athlete who was robbed
of something because of Marion Jones’ cheating: competitors,
teammates, fans and anyone who strives for fair competition.”
The IOC has now lost two CAS rulings within five weeks involving
Olympic medals stripped.
“What better confirmation of independence can you have than the baby
you have created says no to you?” IOC president Jacques Rogge told The
AP in New York. “We’re disappointed that we lose the case, of course.
But it strengthens us to say to the athletes, ‘You can trust the Court
of Arbitration. They are independent. They are free. They can rule
against the IOC.”’
Belarus hammer throwers Vadim Devyatovskiy and Ivan Tsikhan won their
appeals last month against disqualification from the 2008 Beijing
Games and regained their silver and bronze medals, respectively. Both
had elevated levels of testosterone, but the CAS panel said tests were
invalid because international laboratory standards in Beijing were not
respected.
“The IOC will continue to enforce its zero tolerance policy in the
fight against doping for the sake of the athletes’ health and to
ensure fair competition,” the IOC said in a statement.
The CAS panel said it accepted the IOC’s claim that Jones was possibly
not the only U.S. runner doping in Sydney, and it was mindful that
Gaines later served a doping ban for cheating in 2002-03 with the same
designer steroid— known as “the clear”—that Jones used.
However, CAS warned that judging an athlete based on suspicion could
“deliver a fatal blow to any serious fight against doping and the
CAS’s reputation.”
The case involving the sprinters was heard over two days in Lausanne,
Switzerland, in May, when the relay runners’ legal team argued they
should not be punished for cheating by Jones.
The panel agreed unanimously Friday that the IAAF’s rule in 2000 was
the decisive point.
The court also confirmed its own precedent set five years ago in a
previous doping case involving U.S. relay runners at the Sydney
Olympics. That panel determined that teammates of Jerome Young should
not lose their 4x400 gold medals after he received a retroactive ban
from 1999-2001—meaning he was technically ineligible to compete in
Sydney.
Young’s relay partners—Michael Johnson, Antonio Pettigrew, Angelo
Taylor, Alvin Harrison and Calvin Harrison—won their appeal to CAS
after the IAAF annulled their result.
However, the IOC ended up stripping the entire team of the medals in
2008 following the admission of doping by Pettigrew. The IAAF amended
its rules in 2003 so that relay teams could then be disqualified if
one member was caught doping.
The ruling Friday dashed the hopes of Jamaica’s team of being upgraded
from silver to gold in the 4x400 relay. Russia finished third and
Nigeria out of the medals in fourth. In the 4x100, the U.S. edged
France out of the medals.
* if he were still alive.