more Kelli White

[Guest]

First, the ground has been pretty thoroughly covered on what she took and whether or not it really is a stimulant. The basic problem is Kelli's failure to list the medication, the reason for its usuage and to get an IAAF reading on whether it was to be a problem on race day. Had she correctly filled out the form, none of this would be going on.

My question is, how will this affect her rankings in the 100 & 200. She obviously lost massive "honors", but Edwards' two medals may give USATF a bit of an "honors" boost. She would probably lose the two WL marks at the meet, but ATFS will probably carry the 200, as that race was "clean". I assume that RH, DJ etc are working on this even as I type. I would be interested in the feedback.

Ordinarially, I would have just addressed this to the TFN email, but I havn't had much luck with responses since my return from Paris.

[gh]

Re: more Kelli White

First, I don't think you can make the assumption that filling out the form would end White's woes. There will would have been a strange spike on the spectrograph/chromatograph/whatever diagnostic tool they use they days. That would have been investigated, and when it turned out to be something in the "related substances" class, probably would have been nailed anyway.

If White is found guilty, T&FN will follow IAAF protocol and throw out all her performances from the meet in question. Throw out both in the sense of being in the yearly lists and in terms of being counted in the World Rankings. Edwards and Kapchinskya would be treated as the world champions.

Nonetheless, a quick personal look (not speaking officially in a Ranker capacity, or speaking for any other Ranker), I would GUESS that her overall season(s) are still so good that she'd end up No. 1 in both.

ATFS may well choose to list her "clean" 200 on its lists, but note that T&FN is tougher than ATFS on drug penalties. If somebody gets a steroid positive, we cancel their whole season for that calendar year, not just from that meet forward. So we penalize those athletes for more than 2 years. (Our rationale is that if you get a steroid positive in the middle of the season, you didn't just somehow start doing it that week.)