Canada’s 4×100-meter relay runners, who left the Tokyo Olympics with bronze medals, will have to fish out those medals from trophy cases, mom’s house and other safekeeping spots so they can upgrade to silver ones.
The reallocation of Olympic medals on account of doping violations can be a lengthy process but, on Thursday, the British Olympic Association announced that it has been asked formally to return the silver medals its men’s 4×100 relay team received in Tokyo. That puts Canada one step closer to officially moving up to second place behind Italy and China moving to third.
“It’s obviously not the way we wanted to win a silver medal but we’re still grateful to upgrade the bronze medal we won in Tokyo last summer,” Andre De Grasse said in a statement.
This means De Grasse should soon have a complete set of medals — gold, silver and bronze — from the Tokyo Olympics to go with the silver and two bronze he won at the 2016 Rio Games. His teammates of his, Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake and Brendon Rodney, will get their first silver medals.
“It’s always cool when you can get something that you’ve never gotten before. I have four relay medals but they’re all bronze, ”Brown said, referring to his medals from him from the 2016 and 2020 Olympics and 2013 and 2015 world championships.
But Brown agreed with his teammates that this isn’t the way anyone really wants to win an Olympic medal.
“It’s hard for me to celebrate getting this medal because it came at the expense of another team and three runners who did nothing wrong,” he said.
The British team was stripped of its medal after a sample taken in Tokyo from one runner, Chijindu Ujah, was found to contain a prohibited performance-enhancing substance and the Court of Arbitration for Sports did not accept Ujah’s claim that he unknowingly consumed it through a contaminated supplement.
Any doping case in sprinting hurts the sport’s ongoing attempts to rehabilitate its troubled reputation, Brown said. “We try to move away from that but the scandals always make headlines,” he said.
This medal is still not the color this relay team wants or thinks it has the speed to achieve, if it can find fast transitions and hang on to the baton.
“We get a silver now but we still didn’t win the race, which is the expectation that we had for this team because we know what we are capable of,” Brown said. “I’m still hungry and feel like we still have more work to do. We’re not exactly where we should be, which is on top of the podium.”
To get there at the next big event — the world championships in Eugene, Ore. in July — means cleaning up their baton passes, Brown said.
Teammate Rodney said he’s also looking ahead to the worlds, rather than thinking back to what happened in Tokyo. “(The silver medal) might have meant more on the day,” he said. “But now we’re past that and trying to win gold in Eugene.”
The Canadian Olympic Committee still hasn’t received a timeline for when the silver medals will officially be awarded to the Canadians but this process is moving a whole lot faster than it has in the past.
Canadian shot-putter Dylan Armstrong, finished fourth at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and didn’t get his bronze medal until a ceremony in 2015. Canadian weightlifter Christine Girard who finished fourth at the 2008 Beijing Games and third at 2012 London Games didn’t get her rightful medals — bronze from 2008 and gold from 2012 — until 2018.
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