In Maryland, a Fight to the Finish Line

"Because of Tatyana, the state has taken some steps forward, but not the right steps," said Young, who works for the Maryland Disability Law Center. "If you're a person of value, that means you should count to the team score. I don't see any way around that. We don't think kids who use wheelchairs should be set aside and told they don't matter."

McFadden was born with spina bifida, which paralyzed her from the waist down. She was abandoned at birth and left at a Russian orphanage that didn't have a wheelchair for her to use. Deborah McFadden, visiting St. Petersburg for a few weeks, saw Tatyana scooting across the floor of her orphanage and decided to adopt the girl. After almost two years of paperwork, she returned to Maryland with a 6-year-old, malnourished daughter who didn't speak English.

In her first years in the United States, McFadden relied on sports to fortify her health and refine her social skills. When kids in the neighborhood would skip rope, she would join in, jumping from a handstand position. She signed up for lessons in swimming and gymnastics. By the time she entered high school, she had won two medals in the 2004 Paralympics in Athens. She had competed for wheelchair championships in table tennis, skiing, ice hockey and basketball. So when her grandparents asked her if she had a plan for how to best make friends in high school?

No problem, McFadden said. She'd just hang out with the jocks.

A Question of Fairness

As senior captain of the Atholton track team in 2006, Marquel Bowler heard other runners taunt Atholton as cheaters during the regular season because of the points it earned thanks to the girl in the wheelchair. She saw her father, Dwight, the Atholton head coach, come home from practices so frustrated by the nonstop, McFadden-related publicity that he talked wistfully about leaving the job. And she watched, horrified, as her school lost its state title because of a pacing violation against McFadden.

Through it all, Bowler kept her mouth shut.

But this year, after Atholton's athletes attended a prestigious awards banquet only to accept an honor intended mainly for McFadden, Bowler decided she had kept quiet long enough. In her dorm room at Elizabethtown College in central Pennsylvania, Bowler wrote a scathing letter to the editor and sent it to a handful of local newspapers.

"I will no longer sit back and watch runners be treated unfairly because they are NOT disabled . . ." she wrote. "Politically correct or not, I have been waiting several months to get all this off my chest."

In the letter, Bowler presented a multilayered argument for McFadden's exclusion from Maryland races: Running and wheelchair racing are different sports that don't belong on the same track; competing with McFadden felt unsafe; McFadden had tarnished the sport and distracted her teammates for the sake of more publicity.

Most disappointing, Bowler said, was that McFadden's mere participation in the 2006 2A state championship meet had resulted in disaster. She rolled next to runners in the 1,600-meter race and encouraged Atholton's Alison Smith, unintentionally committing a pacing violation that negated Smith's first-place finish and Atholton's state title.

"I didn't want to come off as the girl who hated the girl in the wheelchair," Bowler said this week. "But the truth is these are just things that somebody needed to say no matter what. I was always worried it would make people hate me."

Instead, it made Bowler a hero to most able-bodied runners. At Mdrunning.net, a popular Internet site that features a chat forum and message boards, Bowler's letter -- especially when combined with McFadden's decision to file another lawsuit -- created a frenzy. The board's proprietor, local distance-running guru Brad Jaeger, argued that awarding McFadden points at the state meet would "absolutely ruin the whole sport." Teams usually win the state championship by scoring about 70 points in the state meet, Jaeger reasoned. So if Maryland awarded McFadden the usual 10 points for first place -- right now, she's only asking for one point -- that would drastically alter the meet. And should McFadden compete in the maximum four events? Atholton virtually would be ensured a state title.