My drug hell and a fight for respect

Suddenly, he was a pariah. “It
was the front page headline in
the Blackpool Gazette while the
story of a local man convicted of
rape charges was relegated
down the side. From then on, I
knew how I’d be judged. People I
knew would cross the street
rather than have to talk to me.

“I was 19 and for a long time, I
didn’t deal with it well — I was
very depressed.”

He found escape at the
University of Nebraska, where he studied-fine art. A new girlfriend,
Melissa Price, now US women’s
hammer champion, became his
“support and inspiration”. This
year, they married and are both
off to Paris to compete.

Every cent he had went on
fighting to prove his innocence.
“For a year, I lived off only
peanuts and milk,” he said.

“Somewhere along the line, I
just decided the best thing to
snap out of this depression was
to get back from a drugs
suspension and be a much better
athlete. I thought it would make
people question why I would
ever have taken drugs.”

The boy came back as a man
and a world-class athlete. He
now throws over 2.5 metres
further than before his ban, his

21.92m effort in June eclipsing
Capes’s record. All the time, he’s
watched like a hawk. He’s had 15
drugs tests this year. If that’s
what it takes to prove he’s clean,
then he shrugs ‘so be it’.

Yet why should this be any
reason to question the original ban?
Myerscough tested positive for
two steroids and the hormone
testosterone. His guilt, most in
the sport believed, was
unarguable, a view shared by the
British Olympic Association
panel which last month upheld
the BOA’s lifetime Olympic ban.

But others, including prominent-British officials and those
independent panellists who last
year overturned a similar
lifetime Commonwealth Games ban
citing “significant mitigating
circumstances”, have long thought
he may have had a raw deal.

Myerscough himself still asks
why it took five days for his
sample to get to the lab and when it
got there, why its constitution
had completely changed? Why,
when he asked for it to be DNA
tested, was the sample said to be
lost? Was it even his sample?

He believes he may have been
the victim of sabotage from
someone he knows had a grudge
but he has no hard evidence to
prove it. Ultimately, he tells
himself: “I don’t know what exactly
happened, I fear I’ll never know
and that will always frustrate
me.”

Now he can afford proper legal
representation and has UK
Athletics’ backing, he says he will
fight the BOA’s ban because it’s
a restraint of trade and illegal
under European human rights
legislation. He may yet win the
right to compete in Athens.

“If I could say anything to the
British public, it wouldn’t be in
words but deeds,” he said. “Look
at what I did before the ban and
look what I’m doing now. I can
do no more than get a medal and
hope they will be proud of me.”