Coleman’s a dope to see critics as racist
COMMENT
QUICK of feet, slow of thought. How else to explain the thundering contradiction of the fastest man in the world, a sprinter who won Saturday’s 100 metres final by a street but then stumbled into every lamp post when explaining his recent past? To hear Christian Coleman in the early hours of yesterday morning was to feel bemused by the brazenness of it all, from his reluctance to take responsibility to his insinuation that the inquisition boiled down to racism. As he put it: ‘Hating on a young black kid living on his dream.’ No. Legitimately questioning the new 100m world champion about his escape on a technicality from a ‘whereabouts’ doping charge? Yes. For Coleman to make it about race was insulting to the intelligence of those who have followed this saga. At the crux of the issue is that Coleman needs to do far better. One missed test and two filing failures in a year is not good enough in a sport that has lost the public’s trust. Even worse are ham-fisted comments that make you doubt how much he has learned from this. ‘I haven’t been careless,’ he said. ‘I think I can be more mature about it, more diligent about updating the app. Everyone makes mistakes. I am young, I travel the world, I have friends in different places. Sometimes you go different places and it isn’t on your mind to update this app.’ That being the app that requires an athlete to list their location for an hour of every day for the sake of drug testing. And drugs tests being the thing more than anything else that will determine an athlete’s reputation. If updating that app daily wasn’t on his mind, or the mind of his team or Nike or whoever else is involved in his circle, then you have to wonder about the strength of those minds. So while he can continue asserting he did nothing wrong, he might just be better served by sitting on his phone and entering the correct data.