Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce said the majority of athletes’ comments toward her after winning three gold medals at the World Track and Field Championships were negative, believing she took performance-enhancing drugs this season.
“Some thought I was on drugs to have done what I did,” Fraser-Pryce, asked about non-Jamaican athletes, told reporters in Jamaica."I don’t know why. So the reaction was mixed. I didn’t get any fancy hurrah. Well, some persons thought, oh, it was nice and it was good, but the majority of athletes had their negative comments.”
Fraser-Pryce, like countryman Usain Bolt, swept 100-meter, 200-meter and 4x100-meter relay gold medals at last month’s World Championships in Moscow. She was more dominant than Bolt.
Fraser-Pryce won the 100 in 10.71 seconds, beating the second-place finisher by .22 of a second. The margin of victory was more than double the previous World Championships record in the race. There have been 14 World Championships dating to 1983.
Fraser-Pryce won the 200 in 22.17 seconds, beating the second-place finisher by .15 of a second (nowhere near the record for margin of victory).
The times were very impressive but also in line with her progression. Fraser-Pryce, 26, also ran 10.72 and 10.77 in the 100 this season. Her personal best was set last year -- 10.70. She has gone sub-10.8 in 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2013.
Fraser-Pryce’s personal best in the 200 is 22.09, also from 2012. She has only recently begun putting more emphasis into that event.
“I have not done anything that nobody else has ever done before, apart from winning three gold medals, but it was just hard work,” she said. “The times were not ridiculous; it was just very good execution. I am a very good starter.”
Fraser-Pryce had the sixth-fastest reaction time in the 100 final and the fourth fastest in the 200 final, not that it makes much of a difference.
Her comments bring to mind a press conference from July that abruptly ended when a question about a separate Jamaican doping case was asked of Fraser-Pryce. Reporters were told not to ask Fraser-Pryce and Carmelita Jeter about doping. Jeter walked out of the press conference, and Fraser-Pryce soon followed, but she could have thought the press conference was over rather than doing it in protest like Jeter.
Fraser-Pryce served a six-month suspension in 2010-11 for testing positive for oxycodone. She said it was due to medication she took for a toothache. Oxycodone, a banned narcotic, is not considered a performance-enhancing drug or a masking agent.
