I called Frank Shorter at noon – his time. Boulder. It had taken me six months of persistence to get to this point. I breathed a sigh of relief when he answered the phone – after four rings. Not as quickly as I would have expected for someone who won the Olympic gold medal in the marathon.
We exchanged pleasantries. Shorter was friendly and in good spirits. My first question for the Olympic champion was whether he’s on a bike. That was a possibility – based on other interviews that I’d read. No, he wasn’t spinning, he told me. He’d already done that in the morning. And swam. And a run in the afternoon was a possibility. “I do easy running,” Shorter informed me. Yeah, me too.
Shorter also mentioned that he likes the elliptical machine and how it enables him to control his heart rate. I volunteer that I also like the elliptical -- the treadmill is just too much on my knees. As I’m saying this I realize how silly it sounds. I’m telling the Olympic marathoner (gold medal in 1972 in Munich and silver in 1976 in Montreal), the person credited by everyone as creating the running boom in America, and the man whose face has appeared on the covers of Life magazine and Sports Illustrated (uh, three times), about my workout routine. If I ever talk to Mario Andretti, I’ll be sure to mention the killer parallel parking job I did last month outside the post office.
Running From The Law
That Frank Shorter won the gold medal in the marathon is a widely-known fact. Less known is that he was in law school at the time. [And here you claimed to be too busy in law school to find time to work out.] He graduated from the University of Florida College of Law in ’74 (B.A. Yale, 1969) and took the bar. But his time as a practicing lawyer was minimal. Shorter’s main focus after law school was training for the 1976 Olympics. He tells me that he can safely say that he never had a client – although he laughs that his law friends ended up doing pretty well working for him.
Although Shorter never practiced law in the traditional sense, that’s not to say that his law degree went to waste. Not at all. He said that he used it to figure out ways to achieve his post-Olympic objective – making a living while running. Shorter provided me some examples of this – such as reading the relevant rules to find a way for him to endorse Hilton Hotels, while maintaining his amateur status. He also tells me that his training as a lawyer kept him out of trouble in business, pointing to his clothing line and retail sports stores. As Shorter is telling me all this it quickly becomes clear that he’s got it all wrong about never having a client. He did. Himself.
Frank Shorter’s training as a lawyer also played another important part in his life – his battle against doping in sports. More about this to follow.
The Amateur Trust Fund
While Shorter used his law degree to figure out ways to make a living while running, others benefitted from it as well. U.S. amateur track athletes were at a disadvantage on the world stage. Here, an amateur athlete who accepted prize money forfeited his or her amateur status. At the same time, Eastern European countries were supporting their athletes financially.
In 1981, Shorter, again, trained to be unafraid to read rules, found a solution. It was permissible for the U.S. Olympic Committee to create trust funds that corporations could contribute to, with the Committee then using that money for things such as athlete training and medical expenses. As Shorter read these rules, he saw no distinction between a trust fund created by the USOC and an individual.
Shorter developed a concept, ultimately approved by the International Track Federation, whereby an athlete could win prize money openly, which would then be placed into a trust fund. The money could then be withdrawn by the athlete, for living, medical and educational expenses, using a payout schedule that was along the lines of the subsidies provided by Eastern European countries to their athletes. What’s more, the trust fund was permitted to be funded retroactively, with monies that some amateur athletes had taken in open defiance of the rules. If not for permitting retroactive funding, Shorter says, “these guys were dead ducks.” “This saved several careers,” he tells me. Shorter laughs and says that, for years, the head of U.S. Track and Field said privately that every amateur athlete that wins money in America should thank Frank Shorter.
Not only did Frank Shorter solve an important problem for amateur track athletes, he also achieved something very few lawyers have – learning something useful from Trusts & Estates.
From The Guns In Munich To The Bombs In Boston
Frank Shorter’s gold medal in 1972 is one of the country’s greatest Olympics moments. One reason is that it occurred in the glory days of the Olympics – when the Soviets were our mortal enemies, there weren’t 62 television channels showing sports 24/7 and the athletes were pure amateurs, whose stories of life-long dedication to their Olympic dream grabbed the nation’s collective attention. They made us want to root for them. Those days have long passed. [I don’t care if a team of NBA superstar gazillionaires beats Nigeria 156–73, as was the case at the 2012 Olympics. One team should be embarrassed by that score. And it’s not the Nigerians.]
But Shorter’s gold medal holds a special place in Olympic memory for another reason – Munich. He won it just days after the world stopped as Israeli athletes were taken hostage and eventually killed by a faction of the P.L.O. In Shorter’s book, Olympic Gold, he recounts being asleep, on the balcony of a fifth floor apartment in the Olympic village, when he was awakened, at 5 a.m., by gun shots coming from the Israeli dorm a hundred yards away. It’s chilling. I ask Shorter if he still hears those shots in his head. He does, he tells me. But then he adds something even more hair raising – he also heard the bombs at the Boston Marathon. He was in close proximity en route to a meeting at a production truck. Shorter says that he is probably one of the few people to have heard the tragic sounds of both Munich and Boston. Probably the only one I bet.
The Fight Against Drugs In Sports
The existence of performance enhancing drugs in sports is a well-worn story these days. The examples are so many, and well-known, that none need even be mentioned. Frank Shorter was aware of doping and performance enhancing drugs in sports long before most, and has fought against it for many years. It’s personal to him. Shorter won the silver medal in the marathon at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. That’s no small accomplishment. But years later, after the iron curtain fell, and records were discovered, the gold medalist, an unknown East German named Waldemar Cierpinski, who beat Shorter by 51 seconds, was implicated in a state sponsored doping program.
Shorter was actively involved in founding the United States Anti-Doping Agency. In 2001, the agency was recognized by Congress as “the official anti-doping agency for Olympic, Pan American and Paralympic sport in the United States.” Shorter served as its Chairman from 2000 to 2003.
He explained the Agency’s founding to me. It goes back to 1999, when General Barry McCaffrey, President Clinton’s Drug Czar, allocated $1 million to develop a test to detect EPO – which stimulates red cell production. Shorter contacted McCaffrey, and wrote a letter to Clinton, to say thank you for taking this on. It turned out that McCaffrey’s media person was a very good master’s runner. He contacted Shorter to say that the General liked his letter and asked him to write more. Shorter -- again using his legal training, he points out to me – wrote a memorandum that included what became the structure of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
USADA’s website describes itself this way: “The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency runs the anti-doping program including education, sample collection, results management, and drug reference resources for athletes in U.S. Olympic, Paralympic, Pan American, and Parapan American Sport, including all Olympic sport national governing bodies, their athletes, and events throughout the year. Additionally, USADA’s commitment to clean competition and the integrity of competition also includes programs aimed at scientific research and education & outreach initiatives focused on awareness and prevention. USADA is a signatory to the World Anti-Doping Code and fully complies with the World Anti-Doping Code’s International Standards. Our anti-doping program, which includes policies & procedures, highly trained office staff, and doping control is often referred to as the gold standard in anti-doping globally and is at the forefront of the fight for clean competition.”
Shorter tells me that, prior to getting involved with General McCaffrey in 1999, he never discussed doping publicly. He says he “bit [his] tongue” for 23 years (referring to the 1976 Olympics). But when it came time to speak, his focus was on deterrence. He wasn’t interested (and neither was the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency) in looking back to what had happened in the past. It wasn’t about individuals. It was bigger than that. Besides, he tells me, there was a conflict of interest in doing that.
Shorter’s discussion of doping with me was kinda technical. In very simple terms, as he sees it, the only way to rid sports of performance enhancing drugs is for the testing to be 100 percent independent. Having a sport’s own federation involved in the process is a conflict that gives rise to a risk of improprieties.
So much more could be written about Shorter’s years-long fight against drugs in sports and how to rid them. He tells me that he is planning a book that will do that.