LaShawn Merritt: Bronze medalist ... considerate boyfriend ... American hero

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RIO DE JANEIRO — American LaShawn Merritt won the bronze in the 400-meter here Sunday.

America should cheer for this, cheer for him. Not simply because an American won bronze. Americans are so jaded by piles of gold medals, bronzes hardly register anymore. They should. Merritt ran a blistering 43.85 seconds. The winner, Wayde Van Niekerk of South Africa, just happened to break the world record with a more blistering 43.03. No shame in that.

“[Van Niekerk] gave the effort today, he wanted it and he got it,” said Merritt, who will compete in the 200-meter and the 4×400 relay. “World-record race. I’ll take it. Going home with my first medal, got two more to get.”

Anyway, the race isn’t the only reason. And it’s also not merely because Merritt is a likable, big-personality guy.

And it’s not solely because he preaches the benefits or self-reliance. Or that he doesn’t really want young people to dream for and work toward unlikely athletic success (claiming that anything is possible if you set your mind to it is trite. Set your mind to it all you want, you aren’t running faster than Usain Bolt).

Merritt would rather kids focus on more reasonable and tangible pursuits such as education and business ownership. (The 30-year-old has used his track earnings to purchase a long haul trucking company and a daycare near his hometown of Portsmouth, Va.)

But that isn’t all of it either.

America should definitely not celebrate LaShawn Merritt as a redemption story – he won gold in 400 and 4×400 relay in 2008, was suspended for 21 months for having a banned substance in his system, returned, got injured during preliminary heats at the 2012 Olympics and now is a medalist again.

Plenty of people would be rightfully challenged to root for someone caught by doping control, but that’s the thing with Merritt: It’s the getting busted (and how he explained it away to a no nonsense arbitration panel) that makes him an American hero.

Or put it this way, who could be against someone who might rightfully be declared, shall we say, a considerate boyfriend?

You don’t like considerate boyfriends?

Here’s the situation, as gleaned from interviews with Merritt and his United States Anti-Doping arbitral award report. Merritt won two gold medals at the 2008 Games when he was just 22. In September of 2009, he finished the professional track season and decided to take a break from training.

One night in the middle of October, he was at a nightclub with “a lady friend,” as the arbitration report put it. He had a pretty good idea where the evening was headed and thought back to some television commercials he’d seen for a product called ExtenZe. It’s a male enhancement product that works like this: If you normally can, shall we say, maintain top speed for 400 meters, it will allow you to do it for 500 meters.

Or something like that. Except it has nothing to do with track.

Anyway, on the way home from the nightclub Merritt stopped at 7-Eleven and bought some. He used it. He says it worked. So during his time away from track he, about twice a month, began purchasing four-pill packs of ExtenZe at his neighborhood 7-Eleven.

Then in March of 2010, even though he wasn’t competing, he got word that three of his tests that winter (doping control never stops testing) came back positive for pregnenolone, a banned performance-enhancing substance. Merritt said he was dumbfounded. He first thought it came from a skin cream he had started using to deal with acne, but the lab tests came back negative.

Then he remembered the ExtenZe. He drove to the 7-Eleven, bought another pack, scanned the small print and discovered “pregnenolone.” He said his heart sank. “It was unbelievable,” he said.

Merritt realized how stupid this was and how embarrassing this would be to tell the world. He was already being labeled a no-good cheat. Few people would buy his defense anyway and instead everyone would make fun of his enhancement purchases.

He could just take a two-year ban and be quiet. He wasn’t quiet. He told the world and, yes, the world laughed. He laughed too.

“It was like you go into a store, you grab a drink, you grab some chips,” Merritt joked to Time Magazine.

[Related: Michael Johnson’s 400 world record falls as LaShawn Merritt takes bronze medal]

And then he tried to fight. He went to the 7-Eleven and found the woman who often worked the register. He testified under oath, as did she, that he approached her and asked three simple questions, “Do you remember me? Do you remember me buying anything? I have a situation, would you be willing to testify?”

The woman’s name was Leslie James and, although dumbfounded that a customer would ask such questions, she answered yes to all three.

She remembered Merritt well because he came in often and he was always cracking jokes. And since her manager always harped on her to pay attention to regular customers and remember their purchases, she recalled him often coming in and buying juice, lottery tickets, condoms and ExtenZe, which was kept behind the counter because it was often stolen by embarrassed customers.

So now they set up an arbitration hearing to fight USADA. The sprinter and the store clerk against the system. A three-lawyer panel was brought in to hear the arguments and testimony. You can roll your eyes at all of this, but the entire system is built on not believing the athletes, who have lied, cheated, invented evidence and come up with every outrageous excuse known to mankind.

The arbiters are the least naive people in sports. They trust no one. They believe nothing.

And yet they believed LaShawn Merritt, noting he “demonstrated tremendous character in making what had to be a painful and humiliating confession.” They believed the story, all the lab work matched up even to the proper dose size.

And they really believed Leslie James.

“Ms. James’ testimony was devastatingly convincing,” they wrote.

They went 100 percent for Merritt, noting that it was out of competition and he “had let his guard down.” He wasn’t in a GNC or taking pills from a shady Eastern European. He was in 7-Eleven. Who reads the label on ExtenZe? Especially when it’s late at night and a guy has, shall we say, other things on his mind.

So they cut a guy a break, completely exonerating him from purposeful cheating. “There was no intent to enhance sports performance,” they concluded. They then promptly suspended him 21 months rather than the full 24 because an athlete is responsible for what goes into his system even if it’s under the most understandable of reasons.

Merritt served his time. He kept trying to laugh it off. He didn’t hide from the story and still doesn’t. He didn’t do anything truly wrong, if anything ExtenZe may be performance enhancing for the man, but, it actually works in favor of the partner by causing a, shall we say, longer race to be run.

So it was all for that “lady friend.” It was a selfless act, even.

That should be enough to be considered some measure of an American hero. The 400-meter bronze medal is just a bonus.

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