Portsmouth native fighting to keep gold won at 2000 Olympics

To LaTasha Colander-Clark, it's a simple question of fairness.

"Treat me fair," the Olympic gold medalist from Portsmouth said. "As an innocent athlete, I went out there drug-free. I ran my race. I fought the good fight."

Marion Jones, one of Colander-Clark's teammates on the 1,600-meter relay at the 2000 Olympics, cannot make the same claim. As a result, Colander-Clark and seven other relay teammates of Jones, a confessed drug doper, are facing the loss of their medals.

The International Olympic Committee has recommended the 1,600 and 400 relay teams that Jones ran on at the Games in Sydney be disqualified and their medals returned. The IOC has given the

United States Olympic Committee until Jan. 31 to submit a defense.

It's unclear what the USOC will do, though its chairman, Peter Ueberroth, has already publicly asked Jones' relay teammates to voluntarily return their medals.

Colander-Clark and six other runners - the seventh, Nanceen Perry, has yet to be located - have declined.

They have instead retained Washington, D.C., lawyer Mark Levinstein to make their case to the USOC and to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, in Switzerland, if necessary.

"Sometimes you have to fight for your destiny and remember not to let anyone walk over you," Colander-Clark said.

A graduate of Wilson High School, Colander-Clark, 31, returned to the theme of fairness repeatedly in her first interview since learning that her gold medal is in jeopardy. Born and raised in Portsmouth, Colander-Clark ran at the University of North Carolina and also participated in the 2004 Olympics. She remains one of a handful of South Hampton Roads athletes to win Olympic gold.

Colander-Clark said it is unfair to punish innocent runners for the choices Jones made. She also said the USOC should support and defend the relay members, who say they didn't know Jones was using performance-enhancing drugs.

"I don't judge her; I forgive her," Colander-Clark said. "She did wrong, but treat me fair."

In a similar case from the 2000 Olympics, the USOC hired Levinstein to defend four relay teammates of Jerome Young when it was learned after the Games that Young should have been ineligible because of a doping offense. Levinstein successfully argued before CAS that the runners be allowed to keep their medals because track and field's governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, had no rule in place saying they should lose them.

"The USOC took a whole bunch of positions in that case that are no different than in this case," Levinstein said.

The USOC also paid for the athletes' defense, as it has in other cases when athletes wanted to defend their medals, Levinstein said. In the current case, the USOC didn't contact the athletes until after the IOC directed it to do so - and long after Ueberroth had called for them to surrender their medals.

"It was outrageous that no one spoke to them," Levinstein said. "So what we've done is we've sent a letter to the USOC board and we've said, 'You ought to pay for their defense and you ought to support them, too. Maybe you think they should voluntarily give the medals back, but they've chose not to and you can't take them because rules are rules.'"

Levinstein conceded that there are a couple of differences from the Young case. Young ran in a preliminary heat, not in the relay final. And his doping violation stemmed from a failed test in 1999, a year before the Olympics.

Jones ran in the relay finals and admitted using steroids through the Sydney Games. Still, Levinstein said, the IAAF rule that was the basis of the CAS decision is the same, Levinstein said.

One thing that has changed since 2004, when the Young case was argued, is the political climate, Levinstein said.

"My view is, 2007 was the year they started catching people and identifying the size of the problem," Levinstein said. "The big question in 2008 is, 'What are we going to do about it?'"

Punishing innocent athletes, eight years after a race, would set a bad precedent, Levinstein said. Instead, institutions should look at their own testing procedures.

"When institutions are attacked because athletes test positive, they don't look at themselves," he said. "They want to show how tough they are, so they pile on the athlete who is guilty or accused and then they turn on anybody in the vicinity to show that they are serious."

Calls made during the past several days to USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel were not returned.

As for Colander-Clark, she said she and the other relay members are leaving the legal technicalities to Levinstein. Now living in South Carolina and taking a break from track after having a baby in November, she said she doesn't feel the good names of her and her teammates should be tainted by being lumped in with Jones.

"I ran my race true and I ran it natural," she said. "I'll always be an Olympic gold medalist and no one can ever take that away from me."

Ed Miller, (757) 446-2372, ed.miller@pilotonline.com