HUNTER CASE: DOPING, POLITICS

Underlying the saga that made a big man cry is the tangle of contradiction, confusion, recrimination and revenge that has turned the 2000 Olympics into the decrying game.

The case of Marion Jones’ husband, U.S. shot putter C.J. Hunter, is the latest example of how trying to make sport clean has been reduced to the question of whose laundry is dirtiest.

“Everybody is outfumbling each other for the check on this one,” said Richard Pound of Canada, head of the new World Anti-Doping Agency, which is supposed to have the independence and means to take on the doping issue.

Doping threatens the future of the Olympics far more than the International Olympic Committee corruption revealed in the Salt Lake City bid scandal. It has created an atmosphere in which the credibility of results is in doubt.

Four medals already have been stripped for doping in the Sydney Games. None came from the U.S., but its Olympic reputation still has been damaged the most.

Availing themselves of an opportunity to bash the United States after being embarrassed by the Salt Lake City revelations, leading members of the International Olympic Committee have accused the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Track and Field of cover-ups in the Hunter case and others dating to the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

“You don’t want to be open enough, and at the same time we are criticized by the U.S.,” IOC member Gerhard Heiberg of Norway said. “Things come out only from external pressure.”

True or not, those charges also stem from resentment that U.S. Olympic women’s swimming coach Richard Quick cast doping aspersions on Sydney swimmers, and White House drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey blasted the IOC’s previous doping-control efforts.

“Those who view us as having a holier-than-thou attitude can’t wait to pile on when something happens,” USOC Chief Executive Norman Blake said.

None of this has anything to do with whether Hunter should be held responsible for using the steroid nandrolone that was found in four urine samples he gave to international track federation testers in June, July and August. The test done at July’s U.S. Olympic trials, in which he finished second with a personal-best throw, was negative.

Victor Conte, a nutritionist who accompanied Hunter to his news conference, claimed the nandrolone came from iron supplements that did not identify the drug as an ingredient.

The only sure thing about the case is its prominence had nothing to do with Hunter and everything to do with his wife. Jones already has a 100-meter gold medal at the 2000 Olympics and is trying for five golds.

As International Amateur Athletic Federation spokesman Giorgio Reineri put it: “Without Marion Jones, who cares about this fat man?”

At his news conference, Hunter cried while swearing he would never do anything to shame his family. He said the only reason he had stayed in track was to have promoters pay his way while he accompanied his wife.

So he was available for in-competition and out-of-competition testing at meets June 7 in Milan, Italy, July 28 in Oslo and Aug. 11 in Zurich. He was tested twice in Oslo, once in and once out of competition. The amounts of nandrolone varied, with one test showing a level more than 1,000 times above the allowable.

The IAAF, world governing body of track and field, sent a letter Aug. 24 to USA Track and Field with notification that an Oslo test on Hunter was positive and he should be suspended.

Yet Hunter, reigning shot-put world champion, was allowed to remain on the Olympic team until he withdrew Sept. 9, citing a knee injury that had required surgery. Hunter said Tuesday he had learned of the positive and told Jones about it only after it was revealed Monday in news reports.

“What that does is reinforce the suspicion that there has been a cover-up,” said Pound, also an IOC member. “I don’t know that there is, but it looks like it.”

Even more galling to Pound was that until Tuesday, Hunter had been accredited as an athlete. The USOC has since decided he will be able to attend the Games only as a ticketed spectator.

Blake said the USOC did not learn of the situation in time to act. He has demanded explanations from USATF Executive Director Craig Masback, who insisted his body is doing all it can within a badly flawed testing system.

Dissemination of information is one of the many problems in a testing system made ineffective by the more fundamental problem of not being able to detect many of the sophisticated performance-enhancing drugs.

“All we have done is conduct this system to the best of our ability and financial means on a good-faith basis,” Masback said. “How is it we are the whipping boy?”

Arne Ljungqvist of Sweden, chairman of the IAAF medical commission, said last week that USATF had not reported “10 or 12” positive results that came from the Indianapolis doping-control lab in the last one or two years.

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Masback said more than half of those positives involved an asthma medicine, salbutemol, which the athletes had medical permission to use. He said three involved foreign athletes and three were cases in which the “B” sample did not confirm the “A” sample (urine samples are divided into two bottles). He said none of the remaining cases involved athletes who are competing in the Olympics or had qualified to compete, with the obvious exception of Hunter.

The IAAF wants suspensions announced as soon as the test is confirmed on just the “A” sample.

“When a USA athlete is found positive in U.S. testing and finally exonerated for whatever reason, we get no information,” Ljungqvist said Wednesday. “They [the USATF] have promised to inform us about this in the future. Whether this will happen remains to be seen.”

To avoid potential lawsuits over loss of reputation by athletes eventually absolved of doping, USATF keeps the names confidential until the completion of what can be a seemingly interminable appeals process. Those confidentiality rules are not required by law. “It can cost us $10,000 a day for experts to come to hearings and say that the IOC’s testing science is good,” Masback said. “They [the IOC] say we must employ their tests, even if there are considerable questions about the science involved in some cases. We don’t have the resources to take on the lawyers some athletes are able to employ.”

Johnnie Cochran, who defended O.J. Simpson, was at the side of the room where Hunter held his news conference Tuesday. He already had beaten USATF when Jones was suspended for failing to report for a doping control as a high schooler, arguing successfully that the testing notice had been delivered improperly.

Cochran said he was in Sydney as a “friend of the family.”