SOTOMAYER RULING ANOTHER BLACK EYE FOR TRACK AND FIELD

Cuban High Jumper Has Suspension For Cocaine Use Reduced By A Year So He Can Compete In Olympics

MONTREAL- Surely the International Olympic Committee suspects that most of the sports beneath its umbrella are first and foremost out for themselves, the general good of Olympism be damned.

Well, the IOC got concrete evidence last Wednesday when track-and-field's world governing body, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, halved its two-year cocaine suspension of Cuban high, and we do mean high, jumper Javier Sotomayor, clearing the way for him to compete next month at the Sydney Olympics.

Only 24 hours earlier, the IOC had announced bold plans to test athletes before and during the Sydney Games for erythropoietin, or EPO, a hormone that boosts the body's production of oxygen-rich red blood cells. It's said to improve the performance of endurance athletes - notably distance runners, swimmers and cyclists - by as much as 15 per cent.

EPO is feared widely abused, and until now has been undetectable by conventional means. But researchers in Australia and France have developed reliable blood and urine tests, and later this month the IOC's executive board is expected to give the green light for random testing in Sydney.

The IOC has been guilty of many things over the years, poor judgment by many of its should-know-better members at the top of the list. But its recent creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and now its high-profile pursuit of EPO cheats, are two admirable strides in the right direction.

Many thanks, then, to the blunderboys at the head of the IAAF, who have buckled spinelessly to Cuba's lobbying for the reinstatement of Sotomayor, citing his humanitarian and athletic commission work, previously clean doping record, and that Sydney will be the 32-year-old's final Olympic Games.

Which, put through the IAAF's blender, spells "it's our sport, we make up our rules as we go, and we can hand our stars a mulligan as we see fit."

Let's rewind a year and two days to an auditorium in the Winnipeg Convention Centre. At the head table of a hastily convened press conference were Mario Granda and Edouardo de Rose, respectively the chief medical officers of the Cuban team to the Pan American Games, and of the Pan American Sports Organization, under whose aegis the Games are held.

Before a drop-jawed media mob, de Rose almost sheepishly detailed how PASO had just landed the biggest contaminated fish in its pond - it was expelling Sotomayor, the greatest athlete in his sport, ever, for having tested positive for cocaine, a banned stimulant.

De Rose wasn't altogether certain how coke had found its way into Sotomayor, and he most helpfully listed several other drugs that would give you a more efficient buzz.

Granda wasn't apologetic, he was apoplectic. Beside himself with unsubstantiated charges of sabotage and manipulation, he was spewing forth so much venom that you hoped de Rose had brought along the antidote.

"(Sotomayor) is a dignified flag-bearer in our struggle against doping . . . I am sure he did not intake this substance," Granda spat, offering theories of tampered samples, spiked medicinal teas - pretty much everything except the possibility that a thin white line had voluntarily been snorked up the Cuban hero's nostrils.

Sotomayor's Pan Am gold medal was awarded to Montreal's Kwaku Boateng and Mark Boswell of Brampton, Ont., who had tied for the silver. Both are directly affected by last week's bizarre reinstatement.

Of course, the Cuban and his spiritual leader, Fidel Castro, continue to swear on a stack of Communist Manifestos that he has never used cocaine, which flies in the face of last Friday's bombshell dropped by Arne Ljungqvist, an IAAF vice-president.

Ljungqvist told a Swedish news agency that Sotomayor had tested positive for cocaine "a few times . . . I think he should still be suspended."

Two Pan Am samples were processed at the IOC-accredited Pointe Claire lab of Dr. Christiane Ayotte, a scientist with impeccable credentials and no political axe to grind.

Today Ayotte is livid because Sotomayor has accused her lab of doctoring his two specimens. But her broader view is one of incredulity; she cannot fathom the IAAF's preposterous decision to lift the ban.

"What's the message here? If you're first in the world, it's OK to use drugs?" she told the Toronto Sun. "In the past, I was seriously behind the IAAF. I saw (them) taking a strong lead against doping. But now I'm not discouraged, I'm mad."

There is no debating Sotomayor's competitive history: the two-time world and 1992 Olympic champion has 17 of the 22 highest jumps in history, including the world record of 2.45 metres set in 1993. But then, neither is there any debating his doping guilt, which he, his handlers and his country continue to vociferously deny.

None of Sotomayor's achievements, on or off the track, should matter here. If the IAAF has new information to exonerate him, say so and let him jump, free of this cloud. But don't simply reinstate an athlete because you suddenly decide he's such a good guy that his powdery nose can be overlooked.

In as many words, the late, dictatorial IAAF chief Primo Nebiolo suggested that his organization was part of the Olympic family on its own terms. Speaking for track-and-field, Nebiolo often implied the Games needed him far more than he needed them.

Sadly, that thinking prevails today. One day after the rulers of Olympic sport announced a far-sighted decision to try to nail the latest high-tech drug cheats, track-and-field merely looked in the mirror, inhaled deeply and put itself on a higher plane.

A little like Javier Sotomayor.

The Montreal Gazette