The Olympics unfortunately carry just as many disappointments as successful stories, with each setting an example of dos and don’ts.
Michael Johnson recently sat down with Youtube channel High Performance to recall his days at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, when he won his historic fifth gold medal before misfortune struck.
The sprinting legend had already made waves at the time for pushing past all odds and participating in the 200m race despite injuries sustained during trials.
At 33, he had already won his fourth gold in the 400m sprint amidst all this and was aiming for his fifth before retiring. But Sydney seemed to have witnessed a rough end to his career as he had to forego his fifth gold for no fault of his.
The 4x400m team consisted of him along with Alvin Harrison, Antonio Pettigrew, and Calvin Harrisburg, and won the race in the end, bagging first place on the podium. This originally won Johnson his fifth Olympic gold.
But things ended poorly with Pettigrew and Jerome Young, who participated in the heats for the team.
In a conversation with Jake Humphrey, he recalled how the duo ended up admitting to their performance-enhancing drug usage, which disqualified them from first place in the race.
“I was obviously very disappointed, because I was associated with that relay as one of the four team members. And I was really pissed.”
Eventually, Johnson decided to let go of the prospects of appealing for gold for the other members who had no hand in the doping situation. He very clearly did not want to be associated with the guilty members of the race.
But this meant that his gold medal count, which he had so meticulously wanted to bring up to five, went back to four.
“Never thought I would end up going backwards, right? That…thought never even entered my mind.”
Eventually, another incident piled on to sour the gold medal, thus straying Johnson away from his desire of wanting a fifth one. Further into the interview, he recalled how Pettigrew died an early death that was unforeseen and tragic.
Officials found the 42-year-old Georgia-born sprinter deceased and declared that he had died by suicide in 2010. The untimely tragedy had shaken the track and field world, and the controversial gold remained a story to tell.
