WITH
DRUG TAINTED PAST, FEW TRACK RECORDS FALL
August 29, 2004
by Lynn Zinser
ATHENS,
Aug. 28 - As the women flew, spikes first, into the
sand, a little flag with the letters WR poked out of
the oversize ruler stretching along the right side
of the long-jump pit.
That flag signified the 16-year-old world record in
the women's long jump, 7.52 meters, or 24 feet 8¼
inches, a distance so ludicrous that it served only
to mock the athletes as they tumbled past. Twelve of
the top female jumpers in the world, competing in
the Olympic finals Friday night, approached it only
by falling forward after landing.
Galina Chistyakova of the Soviet Union set that
world record in 1988 at a meet in Leningrad. Now the
Soviet Union is gone. Leningrad is St. Petersburg.
The record remains.
It is in no danger of being broken any time soon.
The top three women at the Athens Games barely broke
23 feet. Tatyana Lebedeva of Russia won the gold
medal with a leap of 23-2½, nearly 18 inches shorter
than the world record.
"Our athletes are getting stronger and our training
methods are getting better, but still records aren't
being broken,"Dick Pound, president of the World
Anti-Doping Agency, said. "I think the reason is all
too obvious. There were a
lot of doped-up performances out there."
Many of the world records in track and field are
more than 10 years old, and no one is threatening
them. At every Summer Olympics, including the Athens
Games, which end Sunday, these standards serve as a
constant reminder of the sport's embarrassing past.
Suspicion of performance-enhancing drug use circles
the sport now, but the evidence of past doping
remains in black and white.
As startling as the falloff from record levels was
in almost every track and field event at these
Games, the times were markedly slower and the
distances shorter than the top performances of the
year. This trend has become more pronounced in
recent Olympics.
It may or may not be a coincidence that drug testing
is more stringent at the Games than at any other
competition.
Of the
23 athletes who have been tossed out of the Olympics
this month for testing positive for drugs or for
avoiding drug tests, eight have been in track and
field, including the gold medalists in the women's
shot-put and the men's
discus. The only sport with a worse record is weight
lifting, in which 10 athletes failed tests.
Lebedeva's top jump this year was 24-¾, but she came
nowhere close to that here. Marion Jones jumped 23-4
at the pressure-packed United States Olympic trials
but managed only 22-5¾ here, with a tailwind.
Bronwyn Thompson of Australia bucked the trend with
her best jump to edge Jones
for fourth.
It is easy to say the pressure of the Olympics holds
back the athletes, except that theory does not hold
up in other sports. In swimming, world records are
frequently broken - 8 here, 14 at the Sydney Games
in 2000 - and the winning
times are almost invariably close to the records.
When Liu Xiang of China won the men's 110-meter
hurdles on Friday night, tying the world record of
12.91 seconds, it was only the second track and
field world record set or equaled at these Olympics.
The other came in the women's pole vault, a
relatively new event in which records are broken
several times a year.
But in the strength events, the discrepancies are
glaring.
The
winning women's shot-put was 10 feet shorter than
the record, set in 1987. The winning men's hammer
throw was 12 feet shorter than the 1986 record. The
winning time in the women's 100 meters was nearly
half a second slower than Florence Griffith-Joyner's
10.49 seconds, run in 1988.
Like the 100, the long jump stands out as one of the
sport's traditional and premier events, made
glamorous by athletes like Jesse Owens, Bob Beamon,
Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and even Marion
Jones. But it has made no
strides since the early 90's.
"You want the athletes in your sport to step it up,"
said Carol Lewis, Carl's sister and an elite
long-jumper in the late 80's. She said she had
shared this sentiment with Dwight Stones, a fellow
television commentator and a former
world-record holder in the high jump.
"Dwight and I talk about this all the time," she
said. "These guys are jumping the same thing we
jumped. This is ridiculous."
Lewis's best jump in 1985 would have won her a
bronze medal on Friday. She has been an outspoken
critic of drug use, having competed against Eastern
bloc athletes who have since been exposed for
systematic doping.
Thompson, who finished fourth in the long jump on
Friday at 22-10, said: "There were awesome athletes
in the 80's and 90's. Hopefully we will beat them
one day. We just need better training."
Lewis blames a variety of factors for the deflation
of the event: competition from other sports as well
as lack of coaching. But she also said it was easy
for athletes to become discouraged when they
suspected that their rivals
were using drugs.
"I talked to a men's 400-meter runner, and he said
he started running again when all these guys started
getting busted," Lewis said. "I said, 'Excuse me,
what does that have to do with you?' You need to
compete because you love
competing. You can't worry about what other people
are doing."
Worrying about what other people are doing is the
job of the antidoping agencies, which have only
recently come into prominence. The World Anti-Doping
Agency, formed by the International Olympic
Committee, began to administer worldwide drug
testing after the 2000 Summer Games. That had been
the job of the I.O.C.'s medical commission at the
Olympics; the rest of the time, testing was left to
the international sports federations, for which
catching drug cheats was at cross purposes with
promoting their sports.
The United States Anti-Doping Agency was formed by
the national Olympic committee about the same time,
taking over the job of testing American athletes.
The United States and World Anti-Doping Agencies are
largely independent of the Olympic committees that
founded them.
"I think the number we got is a reflection of more
tests and better tests," Pound said, referring to
the 23 athletes barred from these Games. "I also
believe our tests kept a lot of people home, too."
Swimming remains in stark contrast to track, with a
steady progression of world records - only four are
more than four years old - and no positive drug
tests at the Olympics in Athens or Sydney,
Australia.
There is talk of a movement in track and field to
wipe out the world records, as drug-plagued weight
lifting has done, although few say the sport is
likely to take that step.
Some of
the records, Pound acknowledged, could be clean.
And some are questionable. One symbol of the debate
is the long jump's little flag.
(reprinted from the New York Times)
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