John Capel

John Capel
John Capel (left) 2008
nation	United States
birthday	October 27, 1978
place of birth	Brooksville (Florida)
size	180 cm
Weight	82 kg
Career
discipline	sprint
Best performance	19.85 m ( 200 m )
status	resigned
End of career	2008
Medal table
World championships 2 × 0 × 1 × Universiade 0 × 1 × 0 ×
World championships gold Paris 2003 200 m gold Paris 2003 4 × 100 m bronze Helsinki 2005 200 m  Universiade silver Palma de Mallorca 1999 100 m

John Capel (born October 27, 1978 in Brooksville , Florida ) is a retired American athlete . In 2003 he was world champion in the 200-meter run .

Capel studied at the University of Florida at Gainesville . There he first played on the American football team at the university. In 2000 he left the team to concentrate on his career as a sprinter. In the US eliminations Capel was able to qualify for the Olympic Games in Sydney . In the Olympic final, however, he only dragged himself to the finish line in eighth place after believing that the referee had shot down the race because of a false start .

After the games, Capel returned to football. However, at the 2001 NFL Combine , he tested positive for marijuana and was incarcerated. Three years after the Olympic Games, Capel celebrated the greatest success of his career. At the 2003 World Championships in Paris , he became world champion over 200 meters. In a close race, Capel was in the end with a time of 20.30 s by a hundredth of a second ahead of his compatriot Darvis Patton .

After he had to give preference to Shawn Crawford , Bernard Williams and Justin Gatlin at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens , who won the medals over 200 meters in that order in Athens, he competed again at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki and won the Bronze medal. Two Americans lay in front of him again. This time Justin Gatlin and Wallace Spearmon ensured the total triumph of the Americans over 200 meters.

After Capel tested positive for marijuana in 2004 and again in February 2006, the American Anti-Doping Agency banned him for two years. After the suspension had expired, he tried to qualify for the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, but was eliminated in the semifinals of the American trials over 100 and 200 meters.

John Capel had a competition weight of 82 kg with a height of 1.80 m.

Web links

Commons : John Capel  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Athlete portrait of John Capel at USA Track & Field (English)
• John Capel in the database of World Athletics (English)
• John Capel in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Philip Hersh: Sprinter Capel gets life back on track , Los Angeles Times July 5, 2008