A comeback for Gaitlin?

The 2004 Gold Medalist Justin Gaitlin is supposedly considering making a comeback when his four year suspension for testing positive for an illegal performance enhancer ends in 2010.

Gatlin, once on the verge of becoming one of the best U.S. sprinters in history, is now planning to salvage his career and hopes to return to global dominating glory at the age of 28.

His agent, former high hurdles world record holder Renaldo Nehemiah, admits Gatlin faces some formidable barriers in his rare return.

“It’s not impossible, but you have to look at it that he’s still banned from competing in any IAAF meets that will keep him competitively fit,” he said during a phone interview. “We’ve been discussing his options. This is unprecedented.”

It certainly would be unprecedented and nearly impossible for him to comeback at the top. It appears that he would have train with college meets because he is banned at the USA Track and Field sanctioned events.

I know one thing for sure Gaitlin is incredibly fast - performance enhancers or not. I would like to see him some back when his suspension ends but maybe with some more frequent drug testing with the risk of being banned for life if testing positive again. Now we just have to wait until July of 2010.

Walk champ tests positive

This is something that I might try to follow a little bit since drug use, or performance enhancers, have been dragging down track and field.

Athanasia Tsoumeleka, the 20-kilometer walk champion at the 2004 Athens Games, tested positive for a banned blood-booster in a retesting of a sample she provided two days before the Beijing Olympics.

Ouch! At this point it doesn't seem that her Athens performance was aided with any illegal substances but the second test reveals that her Beijing performance was indeed. But her positive test was just one of over a dozen for Greek athletes. Somethings seems rotten but what do we really know if we are unable to compare the ratio of positive tests to athletes with each country.

Tsoumeleka's positive test result was the latest affecting Greek athletes.

Fani Halkia, the 2004 Olympic 400-meter hurdles champion, was dropped from the team in Beijing and expelled from the athletes' village after testing positive for an anabolic steroid. Fourteen other Greeks, including 11 weightlifters, tested positive for the same substance before the Olympics.

Wow. Tsoumeleka also announced that she is retiring from competition. I would certainly hate to go out that way.