Jeff Adams got over pity a long time ago, the first time he left someone eating dust behind his accelerating wheelchair. No one needs to feel sorry for a guy who looks after himself.
What he's looking for isn't pity, it's justice.
But, as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.
The crash course on the situation surrounding Canada's most decorated wheelchair racer is this: Adams, a six-time world champion, gold-medal Paralympian, former world record holder and three-time Olympic racer, turned in a positive drug test that revealed metabolites of cocaine.
He's been suspended for two years and cut off from federal funding. His case has been heard by an arbitrator, who didn't buy Adams's argument that drug testers contributed to the fiasco because they failed to provide a clean catheter. Adams used his own dirty old hose, and he says that caused the positive reading for cocaine.
Adams says he never has been a cocaine user. His argument is that a stranger in a bar stuffed it in his mouth about a week before he raced in the 2006 Canadian marathon championship. He used a catheter that night, then apparently carried it around in the pocket of his chair for a week, pulling it out for the postrace test.
The tale of the finger-lickin' stranger "strains credulity," as arbitrator Richard McLaren said. But how cocaine got into Adams's system is not the issue.
His complaint is that he's being subjected to the same punishment as a sports cheat who took a performance-enhancing drug. He wants everyone to know he's not a doping cheat. Fair enough.
He argues that the punishment should fit the crime. That's where Adams is steering onto a rocky road.
He never reported the bizarre incident in the bar. Yet Adams suspected there was some chance he'd have a problem with a drug test. He said at a news conference that he'd called around to labs to ask how long cocaine would be in his system. He knew the catheter he'd used the night of the cocaine incident was the same one he'd stuffed into his wheelchair pocket. He didn't ask for a fresh, sterile catheter when testers told him to produce a sample, though apparently they'd have furnished one.
His lawyer, Tim Danson, will argue eloquently that the people conducting the test owe athletes a duty of care because they have an athlete's career in their hands when they handle a test.
But the duty of care is no less for an athlete such as Jeff Adams.
He's not just a guy in a wheelchair. He's been living proof that the inability to walk does not make a person an invalid. He's the guy who rolled his chair to the top of the Acropolis at the time of the Athens Olympics and humped his bike up the 1,776 stairs of the CN Tower to draw attention to the access issue in Toronto.
He's talked to kids and clinics across Canada and been an ambassador for the Rick Hansen Foundation. Adams has always been one of sport's good guys, admired and trusted.
When it comes to Canada's top athletes, I had to tell my kids who Perdita Felicien was and what she did. I never had to tell them about Jeff Adams. They knew who he was.
Somehow, the kids' pipeline had got the word out about the guy with the huge tattooed shoulders and flame-red hair who rode a wheelchair to a much bigger horizon than they might ever see. His duty was make sure that kind of admiration didn't get betrayed. That's not to accuse him of being a drug dabbler; that's just to say that his name and credibility were precious, and he owed it to himself and those who admired him to protect them.
"This has taken away everything," Adams said as he sat in Danson's office this week.
Indeed, it's taken away his racing, much of his credibility as a motivational speaker, and his federal funding.
But consider what this incident has taken away from Canadians with disabilities and from kids. Adams was a bigger deal than he realized. This mess took away a voice for disabled people. It took away a hero from kids, able-bodied and disabled.
Adams, if he's as blameless as he wants us to believe, should have reported the incident; he should have demanded clean equipment for the test. Since his calls to labs indicate he was concerned about testing positive, he could have opted not to race.
If he wants justice, he'd first better think that there are more victims than Jeff Adams.
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