The only reasonable conclusion in the matter of the world’s anti-doping testers v. Christian Coleman, the world’s fastest man across 60 and 100 meters, is that the testers are seriously pissed off that Coleman got off the first time because they, the testers, didn’t understand their very own rules and now they’re targeting him.
Could, maybe should, Coleman have been more careful? That’s a reasonable question.
But let’s get this right out of the way. Coleman is one of the bright stars of the American track and field universe. Though the missed test took place last December 9, this controversy is erupting now. To try to take Coleman out now — amid the national, indeed international, furor tied to the grief and anger that generations of black Americans have suffered at the hands of institutional systems that are unfair because they or, worse, the people in charge of them, are not reasonable — will not prove constructive. Not at all.
Indeed, this case underscores a lot of what’s fraught about the anti-doping control system.
Christian Coleman winning the U.S. indoors 60-meter championship in February // Getty Images
Which, let’s be clear, is rooted in well-meaning intent.
The authorities want to deter athletes — from all over, not just Americans, anyone, everywhere — from taking performance-enhancing substances. They think one of the best ways to do that is via no-advance testing. That means an athlete in the testing pool has to provide a daily window each day, one hour, in which he or she is available.
Easy enough.
But not.
Because a lot of this turns on what is “reasonable.”
That’s what it says in the rules and, moreover, that’s what arbitration panels have made plain as well.
Here’s the thing:
Reasonable people can disagree about what’s “reasonable.”
Except when one side — in this instance, the Athletics Integrity Unit on behalf of the track and field authorities — seemingly acts in a way that reasonably seems arbitrary if not petty if not worse.
Backing up for the big-picture view:
It is 100 percent reasonable for a world-class athlete to be “available” for an hour. He or she gets to pick the time. Stories about an athlete getting woken up at 6 a.m. by a doping control officer, or, in the lingo, a DCO — please. That’s the time the athlete chose so, good morning, yo.
However:
If an athlete is “available” for an hour, is it reasonable to expect that he or she must therefore be consigned to be a “prisoner” for 60 minutes? Is it reasonable, truly, to expect anyone to just hang around, day after day, night after night, whenever it might be, for an hour, waiting for someone or something that might or might not happen? That’s overly burdensome and thus not in any way reasonable.
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency tested Coleman 11 times in all of 2019. We don’t readily have at hand the figures for how many further times he was tested by the IAAF — now World Athletics — or others. For the sake of argument, let’s double or triple that number. Even at 33, that’s a numerator in a math problem in which the denominator is 365 days, in a year. That’s 9%. The other 91% of the time, what? He’s supposed to sit around and wait?
If you don’t think this is a huge issue, you try it. You sit around your house for a mandated hour every day — you pick the hour, doesn’t matter when — and see how you like it after two or three or six months. (Stop already with the COVID-19 quarantine arguments — hey, we’re all doing that so blah blah. Why do you think people are so desperate to get out of their homes?)
Moving on:
What sort of conduct by a DCO is “reasonable”?
Coleman’s window last December 9 was 7:15 to 8:15 p.m. We know this because it’s on the “unsuccessful attempt form” that Coleman himself posted to Twitter and, moreover, because Coleman said — in a podcast posted to FloTrack — that those 60 minutes indeed made up the 60-minute window.
Coleman was living at the time in Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington is in the eastern time zone (this is relevant - stay tuned). The DCO relates on that form that “multiple, loud knocks were made” on Coleman’s apartment door every 10 minutes for the “entire hour period.” A doorbell was pressed “but we could not hear a ring inside so unclear if it was in operation.”
Also: “We remained outside his door for the full 1 hour. No phone call was made per client instructions.”
The client in this instance is the AIU, conducting the test for what the form says is the “IAAF,” track and field’s governing body, to reiterate now World Athletics.
Coleman said in the FloTrack podcast that he had gone shopping to Macy’s, to buy a suit for the Bowerman Awards. He said he went to Chipotle. He asserts he was back home within the window:
“I came back within my hour. What I told them was that I noted I was there within my hour because I had watched the beginning of the Monday Night Football football game, I ate my Chipote. Of course, that’s he-said, she-said, so I mean there’s not much I can do, there’s not really any proof of that.”
The Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New York Giants, 23-17, that Monday night. The ESPN broadcast began at precisely 8 p.m. eastern — that is, at 20:00:00, according to the network’s publicity staff, which went back and reviewed the time codes in response to my request. Kickoff by the Giants, again according to the time codes, was 8:15 — to be precise, 20:15:35.
Any first-year law student would understand that Coleman would have ample reason to fabricate a lot of stuff: he’s looking at time off. But this is his story. So let’s assume for this discussion he might well be telling the truth. Details — Macy’s, Chipotle — add to truth-telling.
If he’s home, and watching football: 1/ the doorbell doesn’t work, 2/ he doesn’t hear the doorbell, 3/ he doesn’t hear the knock(s) and 4/ for sure there is no call.
Here is where things get interesting because the idea is not to set the athlete up to fail. It’s to effect a test.
Or was the idea on this night a gotcha? Why else the note in the file not to call?
Let’s turn here to two recent cases for illustration.
The American Brianna Rollins (now Brianna McNeal) got a 12-month suspension served mostly in 2017 — after she had won gold in the women’s 100 hurdles in Rio — for three whereabouts failures.
The first of the three involved a pre-Rio test, on April 27, 2016. Rollins was on her way from Los Angeles to Iowa, for the Drake Relays. Her window was 7-8 a.m. Reached by the DCO by phone at 7:08 a.m., Rollins said she was on her way to LAX.
The DCO agreed to meet her at the airport and “traveled there forthwith.” When the DCO got there, she texted Rollins to say that she, the DCO, was “already there and she [Rollins] stated that she was getting off the shuttle and she did not have to go [to] the bathroom … I called her and left a message, because I [the DCO] couldn’t find her. She [Rollins] called back and stated that she had already gone through security.”
At that point, Rollins declined the DCO’s request to come back out “to sign the standard form” which would have said that “she was notified, that we met at the airport and that she could not provide a sample.”
Later that day, Rollins filed an update to the authorities that said, “Not at home. Will be in Des Moines, IA, for drake relays till Sunday. Staying at the downtown Marriott. Thank you. Brianna Rollins”.
The next day, the IAAF said, strike one.
Next, the case of the French tennis pro Alize Cornet. Like Coleman, she was looking at a third strike when a DCO showed up on October 24, 2017, at her apartment complex in Cannes. The DCO said she could not hear any sound when she buzzed Cornet’s apartment. There were other people around who might — could — have let her into the complex but the DCO chose not to talk to them. With five minutes to go before the 60-minute window was up, the DCO called and got voicemail but left no message. The hour passed.
The three-judge panel that heard the case ruled for Cornet, saying the DCO not only could but should have talked to neighbors to be let into the building.
This is why — especially in doping matters — things are grey, not black and white.
It is the case — 100 percent — that a comment to the rules (the rules!) says the making of a telephone call is “discretionary rather than mandatory, and is left entirely to the absolute discretion of the Sample Collection Authority,” and that “lack of a telephone call does not give the Athlete a defense to the assertion of a Missed Test.”
But — the paragraph immediately above that also declares that “as a last resort” a DCO “may (but does not have to)” call.
Thus, tension.
And if in practice, this question: if case law shows a pattern or practice of such calls, and if Coleman himself had come to rely on such calls, which he says is so, isn’t it then reasonable for him to argue that a call not only would be but is warranted?
That it would be — reasonable?
More, that it would be unreasonable not to be called?
Further, technology — the call bouncing of a cell phone tower — would prove that the DCO was at Coleman’s apartment. He-said, she-said? The DCO report puts the DCO at Coleman’s apartment — what other proof is there that that’s so?
Rollins, meanwhile, was not only called once but at least twice and texted, too — and she was called not anywhere near the end of her window but at the beginning.
Cornet was called at the end of her window.
So why was Coleman not called? Why the explicit no-call instruction from AIU?
You have to believe that over the past six months Coleman has been tested religiously. You have to believe, too, that he might even have been called by a DCO as part of a test. Which would be — reasonable.
If that’s the case, doesn’t that mean that what happened last December 9 ought to be open to review if not suspicion?