The ups and downs of 'hardest team to make'

EUGENE — As Sunday’s final-day action at historic Hayward Field got underway, the crowd was told — this is the mantra of the 2016 Trials — that the U.S. Olympic track and field team is “the hardest team to make.” It’s not. The swim team is way harder. But more on that in a moment.

What is indisputably true: the 10-day run of the Trials is a study in emotion. One, two or three in Eugene is typically cause for joy. What, though, about four, five or farther down?

Amid all the celebrating, and there was plenty of it Sunday with nine finals that saw the likes of teenager Sydney McLaughlin (third place, women’s 400 hurdles, first 16-year-old on the U.S. team in 40 years) and 21-year-old Byron Robinson (second, men’s 400 hurdles) secure Rio spots, the real story of the Trials is, and always will be, disappointment.

And how to handle it.

Track and field’s global governing body, the International Assn. of Athletics Federations, had reconfigured the Rio 2016 schedule so that Allyson Felix could try for the 200-400 double. Here, Felix won the 400. On Sunday, though, she finished fourth in the 200, one-hundredth of a second out.

“Honestly, I’m disappointed,” Felix said. “All year I planned for this race, and for it to end here, it’s disappointing. But when I look back and see everything that happened,” in particular an ankle injury this spring, “I still think it’s quite amazing that I was able to make this team. I feel like everything was against me.”

The tension and drama of the Trials makes for a once-evey-four-years study in how to handle what life gives you — or throws at you.

As Jenny Simpson, the Daegu 2011 world championship gold medalist who on Sunday won a ferocious women’s 1500 in 4:04.74, put it, “On the starting line, you have that balance of confidence and doubt,” adding that track and field is, and has to be, a "really selfish sport — it’s you against the world.”

She added, “The selection process makes you go through the fire,” adding in a reference to the Trials, “The gift we get from this really horrible and brutal experience is that when we get to the Games we have a sense we have done something difficult already and we are prepared.”

Erik Kynard, the 2012 Trials runner-up in the high jump, went to London and won silver. Here Sunday, he won the 2016 Trials. Asked what he learned from 2012, he said, with a laugh, “Jump higher.”

Robinson, after the 400 hurdles, “I’m shellshocked. I’m overcome with joy.” He also said, “I just wanted a chance, you know?”

Generally speaking, top-three at the track and field Trials go to the Games. Everyone else stays home.

With all due respect to Charles Barkley, and his assertion that sports stars are not role models — sorry, they are. That’s the case all the more in track and field; participation in track and field in high school and college remains robust.

“Knowing we’re doing it right, knowing we’re doing it the right way — hopefully we’re inspiring young women,” said Shannon Rowbury, the Berlin 2009 worlds bronze medalist who took second in Sunday’s women’s 1500 in 4:05.39.

Math makes plain that roughly nine of 10 of those who showed up here to compete in Eugene will not be heading to Rio. But it’s even harder to make the U.S. swim team.

Some numbers:

The swim Trials, in Omaha this month, held 52 spots. In swimming, moreover, qualifying is, again speaking generally, not top-three; it’s top two.

Because of doubles or even triples — the likes of Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky and Maya DiRado will each compete in multiple events in Rio — the field of 52 going to Rio will actually be 45.

That’s out of 1,737 entries, according to USA Swimming.

Math: 2.5 percent of those in Omaha are heading to Rio.

In track and field, there are 141 spots, including relays.

Not all spots get filled because Americans will not have met qualifying standards set by track’s global governing body, the International Assn. of Athletics Federations.

By meet’s end, per USA Track & Field, there were 1,077 declared entries, 879 individual athletes.

To make the math as apples-to-apples as possible, and acknowledging that 141 is a loose number — 141 over 1,077 is 13.1 percent.

When you’re part of that magical 13 percent, it’s easy.

“I couldn’t ask for more,” Tori Bowie, the women’s 200-meter winner, said after Sunday’s racing. She took third in the 100, and now gets to double in Rio.

“I can’t believe this is happening right now,” the teenager McLaughlin said, adding a moment later, “My mind was on finishing the race and eating a cheeseburger.”

When you’re not?

Compare and contrast:

In the women’s 800 last Monday, Alysia Montaño fell on the final backstretch. She wailed. She fell to her knees. She cried.

This made for great TV.

At the same time, if a junior-high or high school athlete did this, what would the likely reaction be from his or her coach?

Meeting the press after with 2-year-old daughter, Linnea, in tow, Montaño said, “This is it, you know. You get up and you’re, like, really far away and your heart breaks.”

From there, it turned into something akin to a therapy session, Montaño saying her “biggest struggle this year” had been “finding peace and why I’m even trying for an Olympic team,” calling it all that “emotional baggage.”

Montaño was justifiably lauded two years ago when, 34 weeks pregnant, she ran the 800 at the U.S. national championships — a role model, for sure, on many levels.

Here?

“Eight years of my life as a professional runner, my entire professional career, has been a farce, basically,” she said. “Now everyone’s talking about the Russians not running in the Olympics but they’re missing the point. The IAAF is a corrupt institution that is still running the Games.”

It wasn’t until a day later that Montaño — who is active on social media and says her fans help her “pick up the pieces” — filed this to Twitter, congratulating Kate Grace, Ajee’ Wilson and Chrishuna Williams, who finished 1-2-3 in the race:

https://twitter.com/AlysiaMontano/status/750476446796124160

The sequence that sent Monaño to the track also took out Brenda Martinez. She won bronze at the 2013 Moscow worlds in the 800.

Martinez would say after the 2016 Trials 800, “I felt great but I got clipped from behind. That’s track and field. I’ve got to get ready for the 1500. Some days it doesn’t go your way. Today it was me.”

Instant-karma department: on Sunday, Martinez got third in the 1500, by three-hundredths of a second, finishing in 4:06.16. She got there with a finish-line dive.

“However people want to take it,” Martinez said. “I feel like it had to happen for a reason. That’s the way I believe life works, you know: you’re going to get tested. If people can see what I went through, then maybe they won’t doubt themselves the next time something happens to them.”

Make no mistake: Martinez’s third was very popular, with the crowd, with Rowbury and Simpson and with many others.

Simpson made a point of saying she had reached out after the 800 to Martinez. And for all that there is in, and justifiably, in being “selfish,” Simpson said, “I went to the starting line with a little bit more love … and a litttle bit less selfishness than in the past.”

Emma Coburn, the steeplechase winner here, posted to Twitter:

https://twitter.com/emmajcoburn/status/752293842729054208

In London four years ago, Leo Manzano won silver in the men’s 1500. He was the first American to medal in the 1500 since Jim Ryun in 1968.

On Sunday in the rain, Manzano, battling Ben Blankenship for the third and final spot in the 1500, reached for a gear he had often found before. It wasn’t there. Manzano took fourth, in 3:36.62 — not even half a second behind Blankenship, 3:36.18.

Matthew Centrowitz won the race, and easily, in 3:34.09. Robby Andrews got second, 3:34.88.

The race proved the fastest Trials 1500 ever, Centrowitz breaking Steve Scott’s 1980 Trials mark, 3:35.15, and the top-four putting down the Trials’ quickest top-four times.

In the London 1500, Centrowitz took fourth. “I'm ready for whatever they throw at me in Rio,” he said Sunday. “If it’s a 3:33 race, I’m ready for that.”

Manzano: “I wish the result had been different. Unfortuantely, it’s not. You’ve got to face the facts, and congratulte your teammates. They fought hard today. It wasn’t my day today.”

In the men’s 110-meter hurdles, Aries Merritt won bronze at last year’s world championships in Beijing, running on kidneys that were so bad he underwent a transplant — his sister the donor. Merritt is the 2012 London gold medalist and, as well, the world record holder in the event, 12.8.

In Saturday’s 110 hurdle final, Merritt finished fourth — like Felix in the 200, exactly one-hundredth away from third. He crossed in 13.22 seconds. Jeff Porter and Ronnie Ash went 3-2, both in 13.21; University of Oregon star Devon Allen ran away with the event, 13.03.

Merritt afterward: “Given the circumstances, I did the best I could with what I had and I came up a little bit short. I’ve come to grips with it. But it couldn’t be worse than being told you’ll never run again. I’ve been to the Olympics, I’ve won the Olympic Games, I’ve broken the world record. I mean, someone else can have a turn.”

In that same race, Jason Richardson finished fifth, in 13.28. He is the London silver medalist and the Daegu 2011 world champion.

His reaction:

https://twitter.com/JaiRich/status/751951488054808576

Jillian Camarena-Williams, a two-time Olympian, is 34. She and her husband, Dustin, 38, who will be the head trainer for the U.S. track team in Rio, married after the Berlin 2009 world championships. They moved to Tucson after the 2011 worlds. Their daughter, Miley, was born on the very day of the women’s shot put event at the 2014 championships in Sacramento.

“Our relationship is all about track meets,” she said, laughing.

The thing is — it’s not.

Camarena-Williams herniated her back at the London Games. She needed surgery. Then she had to decide — should I try to come back? If so, why?

The answers:

“I missed the sport and the people that are in it, the people that have helped me throughout my career,” she said in a quiet moment Sunday.

She also talked about what she called “my journey.”

Track brought her a husband and now a family: "It’s more about the places we were able to go, people we were able to meet than the outcome. I have talked to young people and brought my medals,” including a third in Daegu in 2011, the first medal of any kind for an American woman in the shot in the history of the track worlds.

“I love these medals. They represent that journey to me. But they just sit in my drawer. They don’t hang in our house. We’re porud of them. But we’re way more exicted about the things we were able to do along the way than the actual hardware.”

After the third throw — of six — here, in the rain, Camarena-Wiilliams stood third. But she knew it wouldn’t be enough.

Heading out for her final throw, in round six, Camarena-Williams’ sister, 36-year-old sister, Christi, a nurse in Sacramento, told her, “Just smile. Go out there and enjoy yourself.”

Michelle Carter, on her sixth and final throw, won, in 19.59 meters, 64 feet, 3-1/4 inches. Raven Saunders and Felisha Johnson finished 2-3. Camarena-Williams ended at 18.81, 61 8-1/2.

A lot of family was here in Eugene for Jillian and Dustin. Her mother. Two of her three siblings. A cousin with her two daughters. His brother. Two sets of his aunts and uncles.

Coaches.

And, of course, 2-year-old Miley.

“It’s a village that supports us to get [to the Olympics] in the first place,” Rowbury would observe. “It’s a commitment to trying to be the best you can be, a commitment to the people who support you along the way and a commitment to honor your country.”

"No matter what I do in life," Robinson said, "if the people back home aren’t proud of me I know that I didn’t really live up to expectations. Knowing that they are behind me, I know I can achieve anything."

After Jillian Camarena-Williams' final throw, no tears. She went looking for her husband and their daughter.

“Sometimes,” she said Sunday, holding the baby, “you are overtaken with emotion. So much can happen. I feel like I’m in a really good place with our family and where we’re at. It was disappointing, but I have to put a smile on my face and be grateful for what we have, outside the track.

“And we have a lot.”

Adam Nelson on the verge of gold

It is, Adam Nelson said Wednesday, bittersweet. It has been more than eight years since they held the shot put competition at the Athens Games, and on Wednesday the International Olympic Committee announced that the winner, Ukraine's Yuriy Bilonog, was now disqualified.

Nelson was the 2004 silver medalist. Now he stands to be moved up to gold.

Bilonog's doping sample was among those re-tested earlier this year, the IOC said, and found positive -- along with three others -- for steroids. A fifth case remains pending.

That's good, of course, because the IOC has done the right thing by Nelson and all athletes who compete cleanly.

But it took eight years-plus to get there. That raises fundamental questions about whether justice delayed is justice denied. If Nelson, already a silver medalist in Sydney in 2000, had been a gold medalist in Athens in 2004 for all these years, too, maybe he would have enjoyed considerably more marketing opportunity. Stands to reason, right?

Meanwhile, the circumstances of the Bilonog case -- and the three others, also field athletes, as in track and field -- underscore an essential, and ongoing, truth about Olympic sport.

Doping remains a scourge that strikes at the very core of track and field. Other sports, too, in particular cycling and weightlifting.

The 2004 Athens Olympics yielded a record haul of doping cases. The new tests lift the number to 31. Eleven of those 31 were medal winners. Three of those 11 were gold medalists.

Meanwhile, the IOC on Wednesday put off any decision in the case of Lance Armstrong's bronze medal from the Sydney 2000 road time trial. It said it needs cycling's governing body, UCI, to formally notify Armstrong first that he has been disqualified in Sydney amid the extensive report from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that detailed Armstrong's doping and prompted the loss of his seven Tour de France titles from 1999-2005.

In the 2004 cases, the matter of weightlifter Oleg Perepechenov of Russia remains under study.

Barring an unusual turn, the other four cases would now appear to be settled.

And it is abundantly obvious -- and has to be pointed out -- that all five involve athletes from Russia or countries of the former Soviet Union.

Two of the other four are women: discus thrower Irina Yatchenko of Belarus and shot putter Svetlana Krivelyova of Russia, both bronze medalists. Krivelyova is also the 1992 gold medalist in the event.

The other two: hammer throw silver medalist Ivan Tsikhan of Belarus and the Ukrainian Bilonog.

In the United States, we have assuredly endured our doping scandals -- the Armstrong matter, most recently, and before that, the BALCO matter.

But so -- at least in Olympic sport -- is USADA's effort to level the playing field. Can the same be said elsewhere? With conviction?

"This particular episode reveals something athletes have known for a long time," Nelson said, explaining a moment later, ""There are more compliant sports and more compliant athletes," meaning compliant with best-practices doping protocols.

He said, "The next focus of the drug-testing organizations ought to be to go into those countries and cultures where drugs are not vilified or regulated well, and say, 'If you want to compete in our Olympic sports, change this.'

"This, to me, is a disgrace on multiple levels. And it's something that could be avoided if more Olympic sports or organizations would adopt the policies we follow in our country."

The shot put was one of the capstone events of those 2004 Games, held not in Athens but on the  grounds at Olympia, where the ancient Games began in 776 B.C.; the 2004 event marked the first time women threw on the field.

As evidence of how doping has corrupted the field events in particular, and why clean athletes such as Nelson and another American, Jillian Camarena-Williams, the  2011 world championships bronze medalist in the shot, deserve applause for fighting the good fight:

The women's winner in 2004, Russia's Irina Korzhanenko -- who threw the shot 21.06 meters, or 69 feet, 1 inch -- tested positive afterward for the steroid stanozolol. That's the same steroid Ben Johnson tested positive for at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

As David Wallechinsky notes in his authoritative history of the Olympic Games, this marked Korzhanenko's second doping ban. Her first came at the 1999 world indoor championships, which cost her a silver medal and kept her from the 2000 Sydney Games.

Facing a lifetime ban because of the second positive test, Korzhanenko not only refused to give back the medal but was named a coach for the Russian track and field team, Wallechinsky writes.

Again, the third-place winner, Krivelyova, was busted Wednesday.

The fourth-place 2004 finisher, Nadezhda Ostapchuk of Belarus, the 2005 world champ, won the shot put at the London 2012 Games. Shortly after becoming Olympic champion, she tested positive for the steroid metenolone. Valerie Adams of New Zealand, the 2008 Beijing winner, was upgraded from London silver to gold.

On the men's side in Olympia in 2004, Nelson took the lead on his first throw, 21.16, or 69-5 1/4. Then, though, he fouled on each of his next four tries.

Through five rounds, Bilonog remained one centimeter, 21.15, behind. On his sixth and final throw, Bilonog matched Nelson, going 21.16, 69-5 1/4.

The rules: ties to be broken by comparing each athlete's second-best throw.

Through five rounds, Nelson had no second-best throw. He had only those four fouls.

On his sixth try, Nelson threw 21.30. But it, too, was ruled a foul. Nelson protested -- but video showed Nelson had, indeed, fouled.

Bilonog was declared the winner, the first time in Olympic history a gold medal had been awarded on the basis of a second-best mark.

Until Wednesday.

Bilonog's doping samples, re-tested in 2012, at the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, turned up evidence of the steroid oxandrolone.  The IOC was informed July 13 of the positive test on Bilonog's A sample; his B sample was split into two parts; those samples turned up positive as well in tests done Nov. 1 and 2.

In Europe, according to no less an expert than Victor Conte, the figure at the center of the BALCO affair, the steroid goes by the name "Annavar." Here in the States. it is known as "Oxandrin."

Conte would know. When he was himself arrested, agents found 269 Oxandrin pills, in three square-shaped bottles, in his storage locker. Each pill, 2.5 milligrams, is shaped like a little football.

You take "quite a few at a time, for toning purposes," men as many as 20 a day, Conte said.

Oxandrin is hardly a newly discovered steroid. The obvious question: how did Bilonog get away with it in 2004 only to be found out now?

Since the IOC and WADA are not giving away secrets, it's speculation. But the ready answer would seem to be along the lines of how Johnson was caught in 1988 -- testers probably inventing a technique for being able to measure at lower concentration than before.

"That would be my gut response to you," Conte said, adding a moment later, "What they couldn't see and couldn't detect in 2004 they can now."

What that likely means in practical terms:

It takes time for steroids to clear out of one's system. That's called "tapering." If you were an athlete or coach, and knew it took, say, 14 days for a certain steroid to wash out instead of 10 because of the sensitivity of the testing instrument, you'd plan accordingly.

But if you didn't know how many days were at issue, or if that number changed years after you'd already implemented your plan, then -- like Yuri Bilonog -- you would suddenly find yourself a gold medalist no longer.

"I would be thrilled if they would award me the gold medal," Adam Nelson said.

There wouldn't be the thrill of standing atop the podium at ancient Olympia. Even so, he said quietly, "I would have some small celebration."