Danny Harris: redemption of a track legend Pt.II
Yesterday on spikesmag.com we posted the story of former Olympic 400m hurdle silver medalist Danny Harris' battle with cocaine. Now read the second and final part of his incredible story.
A former track and field superstar, Harris had lost it all. Banned from the sport he loved because of two positive drug tests, he had struggled to cope with his cocaine addiction and now
he faced the ominous spectre of a fresh even more deadly enemy – cancer.
“My first thought was not to seek treatment and then I talked through the options with some friends,” he told spikesmag.com. “Besides being scared it was a relief [to talk to some friends] because
I really thought this is how I was going to leave this earth.”
Thankfully, Harris sought treatment and had three polyps removed from his colon without evasive surgery, not that Harris can recall too much of the experience.
“
That whole time for me is really foggy,” he explains. “It was a time when I was in and out of recovery. [I was] just not very happy at all."
After thankfully making a full recovery from the disease Harris continued his battle with addiction.
He ended up on the streets of Long Beach sometimes bingeing in crack houses. He later underwent treatment on
Skid Row and has been sober for four years.
Harris started work in public relations at the
Midnight Mission on Skid Row, yet
just as he appeared to be hauling his life back on track came a devastating turn of events.
He was on his way to work at the shelter when he was
wrongly arrested in Santa Monica, California for a kidnapping and robbery. Crimes he did not commit. He was jailed for two months and beaten and assaulted by fellow inmates before DNA evidence linked the crime to another man.
Yet in all of the pain and cruel misfortune the whole experience proved to Harris he genuinely had the mental fortitude to beat his addiction.
“The most amazing part of that whole journey was, I was 11 months sober when that [the false arrest] happened and I was 13 months sober when it was over with,” he proudly states. “For me
that was one of the greatest tests I’ve ever had as a human being. To face what I was really facing, which was to spend the rest of my life in jail.”
Since then he took up a job as tour director at the mission to
work as an assistant for Hollywood film The Soloist a story about an
LA Times columnist who befriends a talented mentally ill musician now living on the streets of Downtown LA.
However, this summer a new, unexpected job opportunity came Harris’ way. One the former track and field star could not resist.
When Bill Bergan, his head coach at Iowa State University had an opening for a sprint specialist at his alma mater he turned to Harris.
He upped sticks immediately and left California with his fiancée Joanna Scott to embark on a whole new chapter of his life - one in which he be reunited with his passion for track.
He hopes to complete the final 16 hours of his communications degree in January, but for now he is enjoying the moment and offering a voice of experience to the kids he coaches.
“Being 43 is a lot different to being in my 20s or even in my early 30s,” he says. “To work with the kids and hopefully add something new like a mental mindset for athletes is important.
I’ve been through a lot as an athlete and I try and pass that along to them.”
His main rival during the early part of his career was the two-time Olympic champion Edwin Moses and he was delighted to hear of Harris' recovery.
"He had a lot of friends, everybody liked Danny and I like him," said Moses, the chairman of the
Laureus World Sports Academy. "I always had an enormous amount of respect for him. I'm sure I will probably see a lot more of him now he is back involved in athletics and I'm hoping do work more closely with the sport. A lot of people that had his problems end up dead or permanently homeless."