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 8� 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 23-2�, 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-�, but she came nowhere close to that here. Marion Jones jumped 23-4 at the pressure-packed United States Olympic trials but managed only 22-5� 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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