The world’s fastest inmate

Tim Montgomery was once the world’s fastest man—running the 100m in 9.78 seconds. Now he sits in an Alabama prison cell, serving six years for writing bad cheques, and awaiting sentencing on heroin-dealing charges. Of all the big-time athletes implicated in the BALCO steroid scandal, Montgomery has fallen the hardest. Marion Jones, his partner, is out of jail and putting her life back together. Maurice Greene, his rival, still has his Olympic medals. In an extraordinary interview in today’s Times of London, the disgraced sprinter comes clean on his drug use, his drug-dealing, life in jail, and the reasons why he embraced performance enhancing drugs. “All I wanted was the big Nike contract, the commercials, I wanted to be the star.”

Times of London