Trevor Graham, the disgraced athletics coach who remains banned for life by USA Track and Field, told the New York Times he was innocent in his first public comments about doping since the 2004 Olympics. Graham, the ex-coach of doping disgraced former stars Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery, served a year of home confinement for making false statements to a federal agent in a steroid investigation that he helped launch. “I didn't do anything wrong,” Graham told the Times in comments published late Saturday after an interview of nearly five hours Friday night. Graham had not spoken with reporters since the Athens Olympics, where he said that he was the person who anonymously sent a syringe of a previously undetectable steroid to US ati-doping officials. “That was just a coach doing the right thing,” Graham said. That move touched off the epic BALCO steroid scandal probe, a major doping investigation that widened to eventually ensnare Jones, Gatlin, Montgomery and Graham and taint other athletics stars as well as Major League Baseball heroes. “Everything goes back to me sending in the syringe because if I hadn't done that, none of this would have happened,” Graham told the Times. Graham - who is based in Raleigh, North Carolina - completed his year of home confinement Friday after being convicted on the felony charge about his links to a steroid distributor in May of 2008. Graham said he is considering appealing the life ban placed upon him by the US athletics governing body. Prosecutors say Graham played a “major role in ruining at least a dozen careers and lives other than his own and ringing worldwide shame to the entire sport of track and field” and has not accepted responsibility for his actions.
