You didn’t know the name Clara Adams prior to this month, but you probably do by now.
If not, then maybe you’ve seen the headlines in the New York Post or USA Today. Perhaps you caught her interviews on CNN or Fox News, or the press conference staged alongside lawyers over the weekend.
Not two weeks ago, Adams was merely one of hundreds of sophomores at North Salinas High School, about an hour south of San Jose. She ran track and was pretty good at it.
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So good, in fact, that she ran the 400 meters faster than any other student in the state at the track and field championships on May 31 in Clovis. But it’s what happened in the aftermath that overshadowed Adams’ accomplishment, garnered national news coverage and roiled the track and field community.
“If I had known a celebration with my dad would get me disqualified, I wouldn’t have done it,” Adams said last week to the Monterey Herald, a sister publication.
“Honestly, Clara would trade all this for a title,” her father, David, added.
Despite their best efforts, there is no undoing the celebration that resulted in Adams being stripped of her first-place finish in the 400 and disqualified from the remainder of the meet.
David Adams brought a small fire extinguisher, which Clara grabbed after crossing the finish line and used to spray her spikes “cause my feet were on fire,” she said at Friday’s news conference. An official for the California Interscholastic Federation, which organized the meet, immediately disqualified her for “unsportsmanlike conduct.”
The Adamses are Black and claimed the action was racially motivated. Dr. Harry Edwards, the civil rights pioneer and sports sociologist, said the accusations weren’t unfounded.
“Her medal should be returned and the CIF officials involved should be subject to a mandatory supervised review of regulations, expectations, and the scope of judicious responses regarding violations of sportsmanship,” Edwards said in an email to this news organization. “The officials made themselves a larger ‘sportsmanship issue’ than the celebratory action to which they purportedly were responding.
“The latter is an individual concern while the former is potentially evidence of administrative ineptitude and perhaps even racial and gender bias by CIF officials, making THIS an INSTITUTIONAL issue.”
The CIF has not responded to requests for comment or provided any further explanation for its actions, which have turned into one issue politicos on both sides of the aisle can agree on.
In addition to Republicans and Democrats speaking out in support of Adams, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors plans to write to the CIF petitioning for her title to be reinstated.
The Adams family hired legal counsel and is considering filing a lawsuit against the CIF.
However, the punishment that prompted the outcry was not unprecedented, according to sources with decades of experience in California high school track and field who were at the meet in Clovis.
Rich Gonzalez, who has attended nearly every state meet for the past 30 years as the editor of PrepCalTrack, was about 30 feet from Adams when she began spraying the extinguisher.
“It’s not a surprise that the athlete was DQ’d. None at all,” he said. “The surprise that I have is the small pocket of individuals who think an injustice was done. When lesser actions have taken place in the past, let alone one of this level, it always results in a DQ.”
Steve Nelson, who retired last year after coaching track and field at San Jose’s Mt. Pleasant High School since 1986, was also in Clovis.
The ruling may have felt unfair, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary, Nelson said.
In his 40 years in the sport, he’s had athletes disqualified for “a million” seemingly innocuous reasons that span the gamut from dropping the baton during a relay to NFL star (and former high school track athlete) Adoree Jackson watching video of himself after a long jump, a violation of the rule banning electronic devices on the field of play.
“There’s a lot of things in track and field that are rules that we may or may not like,” Nelson said. “Rules can be changed. But the rules are there.”
The exact rule Adams is said to have violated regards “unsporting conduct.” According to the National Federation of High Schools, that includes “any flagrant behavior, intentional contact, taunting, criticizing or using profanity directed toward someone,” with the punishment of disqualification from the event and the rest of the meet.
While Nelson said it was written to be intentionally vague, to give officials the discretion to make their own judgments, it’s that same language that PattiSue Plumer takes issue with.
“In a situation like that, with vague rules, the outcome should not be so severe,” said Plumer, a two-time Olympian now at UC Santa Barbara after previously coaching at Gunn High School.
“I don’t like how the rule is written in the first place, and then to give the ultimate sanction just seems egregious. Maybe if it’s really bad, you do disqualify them from the race — but to disqualify them from the whole meet? I can’t even get my arms around that.”
That said, Plumer wouldn’t necessarily support her own athletes taking the same action.
“If they got disqualified, I’d be pissed. I would probably tell them not to do it because I’m worried,” Plumer said. “But that leads to a much bigger conversation about the sport that I love so much. We have too many people in charge that don’t want to make this a more enjoyable sport to watch. …
“Why are we so hard on people? We should celebrate success and let them have fun.”
On one hand, the controversy has shined spotlight on an event that might otherwise go unnoticed. Even Adams acknowledged that the “attention has helped me, has exposed me as an athlete.” Former NFL star PacMan Jones offered to pay her $2,000 for every personal record she sets in an NIL deal that wasn’t on the table before the meet.
Rather than punish the teenage competitor, Edwards suggested the officials could have spoken with her father, whom he noted “clearly approved and abetted” the celebration.
“I would judge that the appropriate — not to speak of mature and considerate — course and response, would have been to address the issue with her coach/ father, including quoting both the germane event regulations and the official, though perhaps subjective, sportsmanship expectations violated,” Edwards said. “By spotlighting this young Black female athlete as the target of officials’ rebukes and sanctions and their determination — notwithstanding her / her coach / father’s collaborative celebration — that she was the chief, if not the sole perpetrator to transgress ethics of sportsmanship, leaves CIF officials open to presumptions, if not indeed outright accusations, of racism and misogyny.”
David Adams, for his part, said he takes “full responsibility” for the fire extinguisher.
“If you want to be mad, be mad at me,” he told the Herald.
The celebration was an homage to Maurice Greene, who performed the same stunt after his win in the 100 at the 2004 Home Depot Invitational in Carson. Greene also voiced his support for Adams, but even as a professional and an Olympic gold medalist his performance didn’t go on without a hitch. While a clip posted by USA Track and Field went viral in 2020, it didn’t show what happened afterward. The teammate who extinguished Greene’s shoes, Larry Wade, was briefly put in handcuffs by local authorities, according to Gonzalez.
“It was a bad idea back then,” Gonzalez said. “I haven’t seen it since, until it happened at the state meet.”
Nelson agreed that it is “a horrible situation” but said about 80% of the people in his circles, mainly longtime track and field coaches, agree that it was the right call.
The celebration has been reported as being well-received by the crowd, but Nelson and Gonzalez both pushed back on that narrative.
“Immediately, I knew she was going to be DQ’d and immediately I knew she wasn’t going to be in another event. Everybody around me was talking about the same thing,” Nelson said. “I didn’t hear anybody say, ‘Oh, that’s unfair.’”
Plumer surveyed her team of college athletes and found a consensus in the other direction.
“I think it’s generational to some extent,” she said. “They’re like, ‘She got disqualified for that?’”