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Sunday, October 1
Will lawyers be the next Olympians?
Associated Press
SYDNEY, Australia -- A swimmer who couldn't swim completed
two laps in the pool.
A wrestler who got his start cleaning out barns tossed the most
mythic figure in his sport over his shoulder like another bale of
hay.
A nation that would fit comfortably inside half of New York City
found a handful of hoopsters courageous enough to battle
basketball's evil empire within an inch of its life.
If the man who founded the modern Olympics was right, then the
man who closed them Sunday night in the land Down Under was right,
too.
A century ago, Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient
games with this as the guiding principle: "The essential thing is
not to have conquered but to have fought well."
Measured against that standard, Juan Antonio Samaranch was
hardly exaggerating when he told a wildly cheering Australian
nation Sunday night, "You have presented to the world the best
Olympic Games ever."
Sydney fought with energy and style to stage a competition
bloated beyond all reasonable bounds. No matter how daunting the
task, the answer was the same. "No worries, mate," really might
be the national motto.
The buses ran on time, or close to it. The streets never closed.
The stands were packed every night, ensuring that no performance
deserving of cheers ever went begging for them.
There was Eric "The Eel" Mossambani of Equatorial Guinea, all
alone in the pool, pulled along not by competitors so much as by
the applause of a crowd that wanted to make sure he didn't drown.
There was U.S. Greco-Roman wrestler Rulon Gardner, a Wyoming
farm boy, beating the unbeatable Alexander Karelin for the super
heavyweight gold. Until that night the Russian, nicknamed "The
Experiment," had never lost an international match and yielded
exactly one point in the past 10 years. Gardner admitted afterward
he came into the match with no strategy.
"When did I think I could beat him?" he said afterward.
"About 10 minutes ago."
Lithuania, on the other hand, never doubted it could beat the
mighty Dream Team. And it wasn't until a 3-point shot at the buzzer
by Sarunas Jasikevicius came up a foot short that the Americans
escaped the fate that befell two other dynasties -- Cuba's Big Red
baseball machine and the U.S. women's soccer team.
Not that either was an upset of the magnitude of the Dreamers
had they lost.
"About 12 guys would have had to change their identities,"
Jason Kidd said. "We'd all have to move as far away as possible."
The team that didn't have to travel had its share of heartache,
too.
Racewalker Jane Saville came into the Olympic Stadium ready to
bask in the cheers of her countrymen only to be disqualified a few
hundred yards from the finish line for "lifting" -- not
maintaining contact with the ground.
On the other hand, it only seemed like 17-year-old Ian Thorpe
was flying. On opening night in the pool, he won an individual gold
and anchored the team that broke U.S. swimming's relay dynasty,
proving that he had a heart to match his size 18 flippers.
Still, the most magical feet in the land belonged to Cathy
Freeman. She began running along dry river beds in her aboriginal
homeland hundreds of miles to the north, but when she crossed the
finish line in the space-age stadium in Sydney, the golden glow was
bright enough to light up the whole country for a week.
American Marion Jones' necklace of five medals was festooned
with almost as much bronze as gold. But that wasn't ultimately what
tarnished it.
Drugs did.
In a sense, they tarnished the whole games. No athlete or venue
escaped the stain.
Before the Olympics began, a Czech weightlifter, a female
Canadian hammer-thrower and more than two dozen Chinese were
dropped from their teams to avoid drug tests.
Then the games got under way and the toll began in earnest:
three Bulgarian weightlifters, a Latvian rower, a Romanian gymnast
-- for using cold medicine no less -- a Russian runner. Another
Romanian, hammer thrower Mihaela Melinte, was escorted from the
track moments before she was to compete.
But the biggest bust, in more ways than one, came when it was
announced that Jones' husband, C.J. Hunter, had tested positive for
steroids at a meet in July. Up until that moment, Americans had
always pointed the finger of drug use at everybody else. Suddenly,
everybody else was pointing back.
Olympic and international track officials accused U.S. Track &
Field of suppressing positive tests on athletes and claimed the
Americans were in a "state of denial" over the use of
performance-enhancing drugs.
When a tearful Hunter called a news conference and blamed
nutritional supplements for four positive tests -- at least one
showing up to 1,000 times the allowable amount of nandrolone in his
urine sample -- IOC vice president Dick Pound lost it.
"This is the usual thing," Pound said. "Athletes always say,
`It's not possible,' followed by, `There must be some mistake in
the sample,' followed by, `I must have got it from the toilet
seat,' followed by, `Here's a writ for $12 million from my
lawyer.'"
His remarks would have seemed less chilling somehow if a friend
of the Hunter family named Johnnie Cochran hadn't been hanging
around at the news conference earlier that same day.
The next thing you know, lawyering will be an Olympic sport.
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