Relay teammates of doping offender Marion Jones want to keep their medals from the 2000 Olympics in Sydney - and some "legal abracadabra" by the ruling athletics body IAAF at the time may work in their favour.
Jones last Monday returned her five medals (100m, 200m, 4x400m gold, long jump and 4x100m bronze) after admitting a few days earlier to substance abuse before and after the Millennium Games.
United States Olympic Committee head Peter Ueberroth asked Jones' relay teammates to hand back their medals as well, but Jearl Miles- Clarke of the 4x400m team and Passion Richardson from the sprint relay said over the week that they want to keep their medals.
The main question is whether the rules provide for such a measure by the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee.
Jerome Young was stripped of his 4x400m Olympic gold in Sydney in a complex case around a positive test in 1999. The other runners led by Michael Johnson were allowed by the Court of Arbitration (CAS) in 2005 to keep their medals.
The CAS sided with the IAAF that Young should have been banned and he lost his relay medal. But the judges also said that the IAAF rules at the time only provided for individuals and not relays, which could play a role in the Jones case as well.
"To take a rule that plainly concerns individual ineligibility and the annulment of individual results, and then to stretch and complement and construe it in order that it may be said to govern the results achieved by teams, is the sort of legal abracadabra that lawyers and partisans in the fight against doping in sport can love, but in which athletes should not be required to engage in order to understand the meaning of the rules to which they are subject," the CAS panel ruled in 2005.
The IAAF amended its doping rules to include relays in 2004. Now all runners are disqualified if one of them fails a doping test, regardless whether the athlete only competed in the heats or ran in the final as well.
The question around the Sydney women's relays could be whether the IAAF can use this rule retroactively, as far as the relevant competition is concerned, while the doping case itself was made public after the rule was amended (the Young case, by contrast, started before 2004).
The IAAF has in fact done this twice before, concerning its own event, the world championships.
The men's 4x400m team was stripped of the 2003 world title by the IAAF and all members had to return their medals after revelations in 2004 that relay runner Calvin Harrison had failed a doping test at the 2003 world championship trials.
The same applied to the winning US women's 4x100m team (which included Jones) at the 2001 worlds after Kelli White revealed in 2004 that she used drugs from 2000 onwards.
No appeals before CAS were lodged in either case.
The Los Angeles Times on Thursday quoted Michael Straubel, director of the Valparaiso University Sports Law Clinic, as saying that he expects the IAAF to act similarly in the Jones case.
"I would be surprised if the IAAF didn't try to apply the rule retroactively because an organization not bound by traditional rules of law can do that," Straubel said.
The IAAF was responsible for the Sydney competition rules and results while the IOC Olympic Committee deals with medals. The IOC executive board meets on December 10, by which time the IAAF should have reached its decision. dpa jb sc
