Goodbye to tarnished gold

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BEIJING -- The International Olympic Committee inched forward in deciding what to do with medals won by athletes involved in the Balco doping scandal.

On Saturday, the IOC executive board went for the slam dunk by removing a 2000 Olympic gold medal from U.S. runner Antonio Pettigrew, who testified in the recent Trevor Graham trial about taking banned drugs before, during and after the 2000 Sydney Games.

Then the IOC took the medals away from the members of the U.S. men’s 1,600-meter relay team on which Pettigrew won his gold -- or from those members who still had or wanted them, that is.

Relay member Michael Johnson, in a bit of grandstanding, said he was giving his medal back in the wake of Pettigrew’s testimony.

Relay member Jerome Young already had lost his because he should have been ineligible for the 2000 Olympics because of a positive doping test.

Now relay members Angelo Taylor and twins Calvin and Alvin Harrison lose theirs.

Ironically, all the members but Young had kept their medals when the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled in 2005 (after it was determined Young should have been banned) that it was ‘legal abracadabra’ to punish all members of a relay that included one doped athlete because rules at the time did not specify such punishment.

That CAS ruling still applies if Taylor and the Harrisons want to appeal the IOC’s Saturday move.

Of course, since both Harrisons also were found guilty of doping after 2000, so they might be disinclined to make such an appeal.

Now there is the matter of whether to reallocate the medals. In theory, that must be done within eight years after the Olympics, which means this Oct. 1.

That deadline likely will pass with no action because the IOC doesn’t want to switch the standings, only to have more evidence from the Balco case taint athletes who would be advanced in the standings. So the IOC will wait until it thinks no more doping bombshells will fall.

It also has to decide what to do with the standings for the two 2000 Olympic relays that included Marion Jones, who has been stripped of her three golds and two bronzes after admitting to doping. She won a gold on the 1,600-meter relay and bronze on the 400-meter relay.

And the eight-year rule? The IOC simply will ignore it, as it often does other rules that it finds inconvenient.

Interestingly, the IOC’s eight-year rule might not even be valid in this case, because it came into effect after the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

-- Philip Hersh