Trying to Clean a Stained Reputation

By 1999 she was representing Morocco at world championships in the 10,000 meters and cross-country, finishing seventh in the short course. She was 18th at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and seventh again at the 2001 world championships in the 10,000 meters.

By then she had met Ar-Ar and married, and yet this was not the most important part of her life: First came the sport, then herself, then her family.

"This is the way she is," Ar-Ar said. "She is born like this, something inside her."

Her life was devoted to running faster and winning, and when she succeeded she was "like a baby when you get a little toy, and you look in their eyes and you see the joy," Ar-Ar said. "You don't see it, you feel how happy she is."

By 2002, she said, she understood she was more talented on the road than on the track. She told Makké, the agent she met around this time, that she would give anything to attain a world record. It happened in her first race in the United States that year; she outdueled Kiplagat to win the New York Women's Mini Marathon 10K in a world-record time.

Some observers of that race said they had suspicions about a virtual unknown beating a field of international stars including Kiplagat and Deena Drossin; Leghzaoui insisted this week that she was clean when she set the record, and said she was tested throughout this time at world championships and at European track events. Later that season, she set a world 8K record in Kingsport, Tenn., and her winnings helped support her family as her father, a tailor, began to lose his eyesight.

But she was still being outkicked at the end of world championships, and she wanted to medal instead of finishing seventh.

"Seven was not satisfactory," she said. "What is seven? I wanted more."

Running acquaintances told her about EPO, describing it as a magic recipe that could make her run faster. She knew of cyclists who had succeeded with EPO, which sends a message to the body's bone marrow to produce more oxygen-carrying red blood cells, thus increasing aerobic capacity and endurance. It also thickens the blood -- "like a Slurpee, almost," said Chuck Yesalis, a professor of health and human development at Penn State -- and is thus associated with heart attacks and strokes.

An acquaintance took Ar-Ar to a black market dealer in Morocco, where he said he purchased two syringes of Eprex 4000 -- a form of erythropoietin, or EPO -- for about $600.

"We didn't think about it's good or bad," he said. "Thinking about using it, that's it."

Said Leghzaoui: "Before I injected I was thinking about a medal, thinking about winning, but when I did it this is when I got afraid."