Danny Harris: redemption of a track legend

The 1984 400m hurdle Olympic silver medalist Danny Harris has battled cocaine addiction, cancer and wrongful imprisonment during his turbulent life. In two parts, spikesmag.com tells the story of the US athlete who now has his life back on track as an assistant coach at Iowa State University.

Many great athletes have overcome poverty and hardship to excel on the world stage. Others have overcome serious injury or illness but few have a story to tell like Danny Lee Harris – the golden boy of US athletics who threw it all away in a blizzard of self-destruction but made it back into track and field after a gap of 12, sometimes lonely, years.

The charismatic 400m hurdler was one of the most naturally gifted athletes of his generation. He arrived like a hurricane, winning Olympic silver aged 18 behind the legendary Ed Moses at the Los Angeles Games and three years later he smashed Moses’ 122-race unbeaten streak. Although he was on the cusp of a glorious future, it did not turn out that way.

For much of his track career he secretly battled cocaine addiction. After he tested positive for the drug for a second time after a meeting in Rio in 1996 he was booted out of competing forever.

His life then became a rollercoaster battle against the highly addictive drug. To add to his woes, in 1999 he was diagnosed with colon cancer, was then later falsely imprisoned for two-and-a-half months for the kidnapping and robbery of a 75-year-old woman.

Yet despite the battles, the demons and the scrapes that have scarred the likeable Californian, his life is now thankfully on an upward arc. Harris has been sober for four years and is engaged to fiancée Joanna Scott. He recently returned to his alma mater, Iowa University where he is back in track and field as assistant track coach in Ames.

“I love the beauty of the sport... the competition,” he told spikesmag.com enthusiastically. “I love it when the kids get in shape, the look on their faces when they get a new technique that they’ve been able to refine or perfect – it’s a beautiful thing.”

It would be easy to demonise Harris. He is eager to clarify he abhors the use of performance enhancing drugs and his narcotic of choice could hardly be deemed as having a beneficial impact on his athletics.

His downfall has been well documented. An occasional user of marijuana during his early track and field career he first experimented with cocaine in 1988. A silver medal winner in the previous year’s World Championships in Rome - he finished just 0.02 behind the great Moses - many expected Harris to go one better at the Seoul Olympics.

However, injury marred his preparations ahead of the US Trials and despite running 47.76 - a time which would have been good enough for silver at the 2008 Beijing Games - he could finish only fifth and missed out on a place in the US Olympic team.

Demoralised by the experience and low on self-esteem he started to “hang around with people I wouldn’t normally associate” and first tried cocaine.

"That's when things started to come apart,” he explains. “It never occurred to me I had a problem until it was too late."

Harris, whose mother died aged three and his father when he was 14, refuses to use his difficult childhood as a crutch.

“I would imagine that most elite athletes have a little bit [of a] different drive,” he explains. “When I go surfing I don’t want to ride the 4ft wave I want to ride the 8ft wave. I guess as an athlete that was probably a negative for me... my tolerance was a little bit deeper."

Despite his addiction, in 1990 Harris was ranked No.1 in the world and the following year he ran a PB 47.38 to become the fourth fastest man in history for the distance.

"The way I used cocaine you could not go out and run 400m hurdles,” he explains. “I never competed under the influence. Being able to perform at that level was a little bit of a testament to how [good] an athlete I really was."

But in 1992 he was banned for four years after testing positive for cocaine at the US Indoor Championships.

The ban ended one year early in 1995 and hoped to make the US team for the 1996 Atlanta Games. Yet his ambitions came to a shuddering halt after another positive test at that competition in Rio. Harris was banned for life. It was a devastating moment.

“The most hurtful part was getting the info by mail and having to go to my coach [Steve Lynn] and tell him that I’d ‘done it again coach’ and that it was over. Athletics had been a part of my life for 13 years and to know that it was over and to see the disappointment on his face, that was painful.”

Struggling to adapt to life without the discipline of track and field Harris tried a range of jobs from personal fitness trainer to welder and then came the shock news in 1999. He was diagnosed with cancer.

Read part two of the incredible story of Danny Harris here.

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