Danny Harris
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| Olympic medal record | |||
| Men's athletics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Silver | 1984 Los Angeles | 400 m hurdles | |
Danny Lee Harris (born September 7, 1965 in Torrance, CA) is a former American 400mH runner who won silver medals at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and the 1987 World Championships in Rome. Harris' greatest moment came at a meeting in Madrid in 1987 where he beat Edwin Moses who had been undefeated since 1976. Later in the same year Harris came very close to defeating Moses again in a dramatic final at the World Championships. In the end Moses defended his title by 2/100 of a second. Harris did not take part in the 1988 Olympics after finishing fifth at the 1988 US trials in Indianapolis. Shortly afterwards he began using cocaine; In 1992 he tested positive and was temporarily banned. Four years later he tested positive for cocaine again, and the ban was made permanent.
On Nov. 10, 2004, while employed as a personal trainer and living voluntarily at the CLARE foundation (a sober-living facility in Santa Monica, California), Harris was arrested for the kidnapping and robbery of a 75-year-old woman, and held on a $1.44 million bail. Police hounds had tracked an article of clothing left at the crime scene to the foundation, and three witnesses had identified him in a photographic lineup. DNA evidence left at the scene, however, matched only Alonzo Taylor, a convicted burglar who was already in custody for an unrelated crime. Harris remained jailed while prosecutors attempted unsuccessfully to find links between the two. Two days after an in-person lineup resulted in witnesses identifying only Taylor, the charges were dismissed, with an apology from the presiding judge over his two-month stay in a Los Angeles County jail.
Danny Harris is an alumni of Perris High School in Perris, CA where he grew up. He came to coach the boy's track team in 2001 and helped lead them to their first League Champion since he ran for the school almost 20 years earlier.
