This time, back the drug cheat

SHELTON E-mail: Click here Archive

By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published September 30, 2000

SYDNEY, Australia -- Call me a sucker. I believe the drug cheat.

Tell me I am a fool. I see the tears, and I hear the tale, and I believe. This is not about a villain. This is about a victim.

Try to sell me land. I know there are cheaters everywhere, but this time I buy the athlete's explanation. This is not an attempt to circumvent the rules. This is the result of an honest mistake.

Give me some credit. No, we are not talking about C.J. Hunter.

We are talking about Andreea Raducan, the real victim of these Games.

She had a cold. She took a pill. The scoundrel.

If you want to feel sorry for someone, do not waste it on Hunter. According to the international track officials, the big lug tested positive four times. As they say in the lab, that's a lot of urine to dispute. Do not waste your sympathy on Bulgarian weightlifters or British rowers or Italian cyclists.

But you should feel for Andreea Raducan.

She tested positive for the sniffles.

Actually, Raducan tested positive for pseudoephedrine, a drug so strong, so powerful, it actually lessens an athlete's urge to cough. Seriously. Everyone involved in this case, from the IOC on down, agrees that Raducan had a cold and her team doctor gave her two tablets. She won her second gold medal. Not long after, she was being labeled an outlaw.

Yep, that's the goal. The heck with the growth hormones and the speed stimulants. You have to stop those who wish to clear up the congestion in these Olympics.

This tests positive for ridiculous, and frankly, the rest of us should be as outraged as the Romanians are. The president of their Olympic committee, old tennis ogre Ion Tiriac, says he will resign. The other Romanian gymnasts considered returning their medals. The country's president, Emil Constantinescu, has offered Raducan the $30,000 she would have gotten from the government for the medal, but Romanians in Australia had been willing to raise the money themselves.

What if she were American? What if it was Mary Lou Retton or Kerri Strug who was crying constantly, who fled the athletes village? Would we be outraged then?

Blame Hunter for this. And Ben Johnson and Michelle Smith and Linford Christie and the East Germans. Because if the drug cheats have done anything to screw up the Olympics, they have taken all the good excuses. They will look you in the eye like a wayward spouse, and they will swear it never happened, no matter what the evidence says, and furthermore, if it did happen, it was a conspiracy, and for the record, if it wasn't a conspiracy, it will never happen again.

They have postured and promised and vowed to find the real culprits. They have talked about swapped samples and tainted toothbrushes until you believe that some giant, secret urine syndicate is out there framing perfectly innocent athletes. And so the IOC has declared that no excuse will do. Especially not the one about common sense.

Which leads us back to Raducan.

She had a dry throat.

The absurdity should surprise no one. With the IOC, that's often what you get. The IOC is like a small-town sheriff with a very slow car; he prosecutes only the speeders he can catch. Consider Dr. James Yesalas, a drug expert from Penn State, who has said that a small percentage of athletes are clean in these Games, and a small percentage are caught, and a great many are using something that cannot be detected by testing. The running joke around here is that the IOC does not really have a test for drugs; it has a test for stupidity. In order to get caught for the first, you have to fail the second.

"Hundreds of people are using growth hormones, and what do these people do?" Yesalas said. "They take the gold medal from a kid who took a cold medication given to her by a team physician. If it wasn't so sad, it would be laughable."

And so the Games have been protected from Andreea Raducan, serial sneezer. Her gold medal has been reclaimed. What would they have done if she had used a Contac? Shot her?

Oh, come on. Look at Raducan. Is this a drug cheat? The IOC knew better. But what is justice given the opportunity to look haughty and decisive? So, forgetting there are such things as felonies and such things as misdemeanors, they ripped the medal from around her neck. Given her punishment, she might as well have tested positive for nandrolone. Someone from the IOC should have pounded a fist on the table -- vice president Dick Pound; he has the name for it -- and called for a little sanity in the room. Maybe he should have asked this. "Hey, guys. Would a dose of cold medicine really help a gymnast?"

This is the difference, and this is why you can believe in Raducan. At his news conference the other day, Hunter actually asked the media: "Why would I do this?" Oh, I don't know, C.J. Maybe fame, maybe fortune, maybe the goal you've been chasing for a decade. Pound, for instance, was so moved by Hunter's excuses that he grabbed his sides and fell over laughing.

But why would Raducan? Because she couldn't figure out if it was "starve a cold, feed a fever" or the other way around?

Look, it's hard to take anyone's side in the drug wars. If you doubt everyone, you don't get fooled. Personally, I doubt the IOC, which has tested positive for graft a time or three. I doubt U.S. Track and Field which, given the choice, wouldn't have told us about Hunter's positive tests until the 12th of never. I doubt C.J., who has made an Olympian out of Johnnie Cochran. I doubt everyone who can lift more weight than your average coxswain.

Did you get a load of the news conference the other day in which Craig Masback, head of the U.S. track federation, positively glowed as he announced that hey, his organization never caught anyone doing anything at any time? To Masback, this was splendid news. He came across as a Texas Ranger arguing that he had never caught a train robber, so therefore, trains had never been robbed, and all that talk about Butch and/or Sundance was just sour grapes. You wonder what the U.S. drug test consists of. A true-false test with a No. 2 pencil, perhaps?

Craig, the point just isn't how many you've caught. It's how many you haven't.

Meanwhile, while the debate rages, a young girl cries on her birthday for doing absolutely zero wrong. And all we can do is suffer along.

And hope, of course, that as the officials took her medal, she sneezed on them.

TV coverage:

Noon-6 p.m., 7 p.m.-midnight; 12:30-2 a.m., Ch. 8; 10 a.m.-4 p.m., MSNBC; 4-9 p.m., CNBC.

HIGHLIGHTS: Ch. 8 has women's gold medal basketball in its afternoon broadcast. In prime time, it offers the men's platform diving final, the men's basketball final and several track events, including Marion Jones on the 4x100 and 4x400 relay teams. MSNBC will show the men's gold medal soccer match and water polo. CNBC has boxing finals and water polo.

On The Wire