Sprinter John Capel gets life back on track

Especially from an 8-year-old who, her father says, reads at a sixth-grade level.

John Capel's older daughter, Janya, was 7 when she began Googling her father's name. She found out he made two Olympic teams and was a world champion in track and field, but those weren't the items in the stories that made the biggest impression on her.

It was Capel's frequent problems with marijuana that caught her attention.

He tested positive at the 2001 NFL combine, was arrested for possession a couple of months later, then tested positive again in 2004 and 2006, leading to a two-year ban from track. Capel, 29, said it was Janya's reaction to what she read on the Internet that led him to clean up his act and return to the sport in time to compete at the U.S. Olympic trials.

He finished third in a first-round heat of the 200 meters Friday with a time of 20.73 seconds and moved into today's quarterfinals. Last weekend, Capel was eliminated in the 100-meter semifinals.

"Listening to my little girl just about every other day talking about me getting in trouble for smoking [turned me around]," Capel said. "She will probably get on me tonight again. She'll say, 'Dad, are you still getting in trouble? Are you still smoking? Are you making good decisions?'

"She is a pretty brutal little girl. She says more to me about it than my wife does."

Janya Capel's hectoring came on the heels of another epiphany for Capel. In 2007, his offer to help as a football coach at his old high school was declined for fear he would be a bad influence.

"I was hard-headed," Capel said. "I never was the type of person that went by the rules too much. I always kind of went by my own. When you are in professional sports, you have to go by their rules, and it took me a little time to learn that."

Marijuana cost Capel plenty. A talented wide receiver at Florida, he dropped to the seventh round of the NFL draft after the positive test at the combine. The Bears, who drafted him, cut Capel before the start of his first training camp, two months after the possession arrest. He soon returned to track.

In 2004, U.S. Olympic coach George Williams chose not to use Capel on the sprint relay, which won a silver medal, because he had tested positive at a meet in Germany three weeks earlier. Although that offense did not include a suspension, Williams clearly was worried Capel might test positive again during the Athens Games.