You would never know by watching Chryste Gaines drive her spikes into Georgia Tech's track that she's 37 and an academics counselor who sees herself in —- not at —- this summer's Olympics.

Unless you just know of the doubt that surrounds Gaines.

She blazed to a gold medal at the Summer Games in Atlanta. But that was 11 years ago. Today, she is ancient in the world's ultimate fast-twitch sport.

And this is no typical comeback by any stretch of muscle or imagination.

Try battling back as a pariah while insisting you never should have been one.

Her crimes?

Guilt by association, for sure, given a long relationship with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). Company founder Victor Conte once described Gaines as a pioneer of sorts, the second person to whom he gave "the clear," a performance-enhancing steroid.

Being connected with BALCO is as bad for a track athlete as a baseball player being highlighted in the Mitchell Report.

Yet it's difficult to be sure what Gaines has done that's wrong.

She says that every BALCO product —- and everything else —- she's ever taken was legal. But Conte said he gave her banned substances.

Gaines was banned from her sport for two years, until last June, for using banned substances, yet has never tested positive for them.

Most important, Kelli White, a former training partner, testified that Gaines told her that she had used the undetectable steroid made by BALCO. Gaines points out that White is an admitted doper who lied many times about using steroids.

Lastly, when Gaines had a chance to tell her side of the story to a court, she sat silent, declining to testify.

So few really know.

Sometimes, the truth isn't as easy to reach as a finish line.

Inspired by '76 Games

While growing up in Dallas, Texas, Gaines dreamed of Olympic medals. She figured that she'd one day flip and spin to win rather than run.

"From the time I was 6, I was going to be a doctor and I was going to be an Olympic gold medalist," she said. "I was watching the '76 Olympics and I thought I was going to be a gymnast.

"I just had a growth spurt, and that killed my dream of being the next Nadia Comaneci. But lucky for me the growth spurt had some speed behind it."

While growing up, she played several sports. Her first crack at track showed her real gift. As a 13-year-old rookie in the sport, Gaines won a national title in the 200 meters in '83 in the L.A. Coliseum.

She was All-America at Stanford, an Olympian in '96, U.S. indoor 60-meters champion in '01 and '02, and ranked No. 2 in the world in the 100 meters in '03.

But she is best known for her 400-meter relay work, running on world championship teams in '95 and '97.

Her signature moment came in Atlanta, where she ran leadoff on the gold medal team in '96.

"I can say it was a big deal in my life," she said.

That was then.

Now she competes in lower-level meets.

She won a 60-meter dash last month in a meet in New York in a field of seven. Her time of 7.39 seconds would have placed her eighth in the college division of the same meet.

"I was hoping to run faster than that," she said. "My start was horrible."

Last Sunday, in the U.S. Indoor championships in Boston, her time of 7.45 seconds was 11th-best of 14 competitors.

Again, now is a long time ago from then.

Gaines was absolutely world-class from the early 1990s to 2003.

Just as she was peaking in the 100 meters, however, her name began sinking, popping up as BALCO came into public view in 2003 after the FBI raided the place. A federal grand jury was seated.

The names of San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds, and big-name track and field athletes like Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and Gaines, were connected. Gaines was one of several athletes to testify to the BALCO grand jury in fall of 2003.

Warning from teammate

Gaines and White, a former world sprint champion, may not have exactly been friends, since they competed against one another, but both trained at the University of California at Berkeley under former Soviet coach Remi Korchemny from 2000-03. This would prove a noxious trio.

If one can drop an innocuous bomb, White hit Gaines with one in Qatar.

"The last time I spoke with her was probably May of 2004," Gaines said. "She was saying something was about to go down, but she didn't say what. She said, 'You'll find out.' "

Soon after the Qatar meet and the veiled warning, White admitted to U.S. Anti-Doping Association officials that she had used several banned substances, chiefly undetectable steroids.

Eventually, she was stripped of U.S. and world titles in the 100 and 200 meters from the summer before (2003), and suspended for two years. She has not returned to competition.

In coming clean, she implicated others, including Gaines.

"It was part of her bargain," Gaines said. "This is a person who told them for a month that she hadn't any involvement with this stuff, or didn't know anything about it, and then came back and confessed to all of it."

USADA soon charged Gaines and other athletes with using banned substances. Her final appeal before the international Court for Arbitration in Sport —- the last resort for a track athlete to protest suspension —- was not until the fall of 2005, but word that she was on the USADA hit list spread fast.

"The allegations basically brought my career to a halt because meets don't want you; they don't want the negative press," said Gaines, whom reports show earned more than $200,000 on the track in 2003. "Meets I had run in for years were like, 'Um, well, I don't know. She has this cloud over her.' "

Also in that interim, USADA officials built their case, and Gaines was hurt by relationships in the sport.

The BALCO investigation produced reams of scientific evidence and thousands of pages of documents, all seized and eventually turned over to the Senate Commerce Committee chaired by John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Later, that information was forwarded to USADA, which it used to help prosecute Gaines and others.

The doping agency argued at Gaines' appeal that some of her behaviors were suspicious because BALCO officials had worked with athletes to stay a step ahead of evolving drug-testing methods.

"If you're not attempting to evade testing, why are these tests and urine profiles being done [by athletes and BALCO]?" said Bill Bock, a USADA attorney. "In many cases, we could legitimately say there was no reasonable purpose for conducting that sort of analysis other than trying to evade drug testing."

Conte founded BALCO as a supplement business, first gaining traction among athletes with legal programs to replace zinc and magnesium lost in training.

"I've known Victor since 1995," Gaines said. "He was always helping me with my supplements. I still say BALCO products are excellent.

"Whatever extra he got into [with federal officials] was outside of the products of BALCO because their products are outstanding. I got things with labels on them. I guess if you were handed something that didn't have a label on it, then it would be questionable."

A year before her appeal, in December 2004, Conte told ESPN The Magazine that Gaines was one of the first athletes to whom he gave "the clear" or THG, which was undetectable.

"We gradually started to incorporate [THG] into programs of certain elite athletes," Conte told the magazine. "[Former NFL player Bill] Romanowski got it first. A couple of months later, I gave a small amount to the sprinter Chryste Gaines. But let me tell you something about Chryste: She wasn't a fan of any of this."

Conte told ABC's "20/20" that he had given performance-enhancing drugs to 27 athletes, including Gaines and Montgomery, as well as to Bonds' trainer.

Gaines' relationship with Korchemny didn't help either.

In July 2005, the track coach pleaded guilty for distributing modafinil, a stimulant, to athletes and getting that and other drugs from BALCO. His plea followed that of three BALCO defendants, including Conte.

Korchemny retired, though he consults.

Gaines was one of several athletes who tested positive for modafinil —- a prescription medication for sleeping disorders —- at the '03 U.S. championships.

Modafinil was not a banned substance at the time, bringing temporary disqualification rather than suspension. But drug testers felt it might be a masking agent, and it was banned in 2004.

Odds stacked before appeal

So even before the appeal began, Gaines was stained by associations.

Then White was much more detailed in her Court for Arbitration in Sport hearing than she had been in Qatar some 18 months earlier.

According to written summary, White testified that Gaines called her "not long after" Gaines appeared before the BALCO grand jury in 2003.

White told the CAS that Gaines said she had used THG, a previously undetectable steroid made by BALCO, but stopped because it made her gain weight.

Gaines said, "That's crazy. My attorney discredited [White] on every level, personal level, athletic level."

The CAS did not hear Gaines; she chose not to testify.

Anything she may have said to contradict her 2003 BALCO grand jury testimony could have brought perjury charges. But she said that's not why she stayed silent.

"There was nothing that I could say," Gaines said. "Basically, when you're up against USADA, they have like a 98 percent winning record. So my testimony, I felt and my attorney felt, was not going to make any difference when we had medical backing. They didn't have any positive tests.

"They had tests for me from October of 2000 to two days before I went to the hearing, none of which had been positive. Then, we had expert testimony on what would have been in my system on drug tests [if she had used banned substances]."

Gaines' ban became official in December 2005, retroactive to that June. The CAS regarded White's words as most damaging.

The arbitrators deemed White "wholly credible" in their summary, which also said Gaines' counsel, "did not ... in any way undermine Ms. White's evidence regarding her conversations with Ms. Gaines."

"That happens in the criminal system all the time; that's the jailhouse snitch who gets a lighter sentence in exchange for testimony," said Doriane Lambelet Coleman of the Duke University Center for Sports Policy & Law. "Part of that is [baseball's] Mitchell Report."

After spending about $200,000 on legal expenses, once the arbiters of drug testing spoke and were ratified by CAS, Gaines was out of track.

"There is no appeal process beyond CAS," she said. "Along the way, they [USADA officials] were changing the rules, and making up, 'Well, we're not going to allow this expert.' It's a kangaroo court."

On the day that Gaines and Montgomery were suspended, USADA chief executive Travis Tygart likened the ruling to a Supreme Court judgment on drug control.

"Kelli White accepted accountability for her actions and she is able to look herself in the mirror and the world will forgive her," Tygart told the San Francisco Chronicle. "These two, for the rest of their lives, will go down as not only using drugs but doing everything possible —- and at great expense to clean athletes —- to avoid the truth."

Tainted medals still an issue

No matter what happens in Gaines' comeback, she may have another issue.

Marion Jones will begin serving her prison sentence later this month after lying about doping and then admitting to it. She has returned five medals she won at the 2000 Olympics, where she was Gaines' teammate on a bronze-medal relay team.

The world governing body for track (IAAF) last fall recommended that all members of that relay team return their medals because Jones tainted it, and the International Olympic Committee was to discuss that at a meeting a couple of months ago. The discussion was tabled, however.

"I'm not giving anything back," Gaines said. "Nope, I'm not giving it back. It's been sitting in my house seven years. What does it mean to anyone else?"

Gaines' pedigrees as an athlete and an academic (she graduated with a degree in psychology from Stanford, and received an MBA last year from Kennesaw State), helped her get a job at Tech after she moved to Atlanta in 2001 with her former husband.

A friend, former Tech All-America high jumper-turned-Tech-academic-counselor Lynn Houston Moore, recommended Gaines to Phyllis LaBaw, who is in charge of the academic advisers at Tech.

Athletics director Dan Radakovich said he had no misgivings about the hiring.

"No. Not at all," Radakovich said. "We talked to Chryste, and certainly understood where she was coming from. Her background as a student-athlete at Stanford and her accomplishments as an Olympian, given all the things that have surrounded people in that arena for the last few years, we looked at her as someone who could be a great asset."

Five or six days a week, you can find Gaines working out on Tech's track, or in a weight room. She is just as diligent in working with the Tech men's basketball and women's softball players whom she advises. "She doesn't give them an inch," LaBaw said.

Junior basketball player Alade Aminu compares her to a drill sergeant.

"She's been a help. I had some [academic] struggles in the past, but I almost made dean's list last semester," he said. "I'll make it this semester."

Gaines focuses on time and crisis management. She's had practice.

"I was drug-tested the day [in November when she and the basketball team] left for the Virgin Islands," she said. "We have to provide them with our whereabouts at all times.

"If you don't officially retire, it can happen any time."

When Gaines says that she never stopped running, you know what she means, literally and figuratively.

Time will tell if she'll run again as she once did, but time may never tell how she once ran.

Two things are certain. Only Gaines knows the truth. And there is no backfilling the hole in her life.

"There's no redemption," she said. "I was at the height of my career when this whole thing started. It was just ripped away."

TIMELINE

> 1995-97: Chryste Gaines is a member of the U.S. world championship 400-meter relay team in '95, the Olympic gold medal team in '96 and the world championship team in '97.

>2002: Federal investigation of BALCO begins.

>Sept. 3, 2003: Local and federal authorities raid BALCO offices in San Francisco.

>Fall 2003: Many athletes testify before the BALCO grand jury, including Gaines.

>April 25, 2004: The San Jose Mercury News reports that a government memorandum from September claims BALCO founder Victor Conte admits to providing steroids to 27 athletes, including Gaines.

>June 8, 2004: USADA confirms that it has sent letters to several track and field athletes, including Gaines, notifying them of potential drug violations.

>Dec. 3, 2004: Conte appears on ABC's "20/20," claiming that he gave drugs to several athletes, including Gaines.

>Dec. 2005: In Gaines' appeal of a USADA suspension for using banned substances, admitted doper Kelli White testifies that Gaines told her in 2003 that she had used, "the clear," or THG. That is a banned steroid. Gaines declines to testify in her own defense, and USADA upholds the two-year suspension, retroactive to June 2005.

>March 2007: Gaines, finishing her MBA at Kennesaw State, is hired at Georgia Tech as an academics adviser. She works with men's basketball and women's softball players.

>June 2007: Gaines' two-year suspension ends.