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 Olympic News & Notes
Sunday, July 23, 2000
A nation backs Ottey
Winning the gold medal by beating veteran Polish boxer Zbigniew Pietrzykowski just ratcheted up the intensity. According to "The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics" by David Wallechinsky, "Clay lived in his medal. He slept with it, ate with it, wore it all the time. He wore it so much that the gold began to wear off, revealing a common lead base."
Once he returned home, however, Clay became less enchanted with the concept. Despite his fame, when Clay and a friend tried to get a meal at a whites-only restaurant, they ended up being chased by bikers after a racial confrontation. Afterward, Clay -- who still wore his gold medal everywhere he went -- threw it into the Ohio River.
Or so he said. Some have doubted the story, but the medal has never been found. And on Aug. 3, 1996, at halftime of the men's gold-medal basketball game at the Atlanta Olympics, the International Olympic Committee presented the man now known as Muhammad Ali with a new gold medal.
In Jamaica, a nation plagued by violent crime and economic decline, Merlene Ottey's yearlong battle against charges she used banned steroids has transformed the sprinter from merely a sports star to a symbol of resilience and justice.
"When the athletics body said she was guilty, I never believed them for one moment," said Ray Williams, a 32-year-old taxi driver.
"You've got a black woman from black country on the verge of being one the greatest athletes of the century, and the Americans and British and the Europeans don't want that," added fellow driver Rickard Chambers. "But they couldn't stop her."
Known as the "Sprint Queen" in her Caribbean nation of 2.6 million people, Ottey withdrew last summer from the World Championships in Spain after traces of the banned steroid Nandrolone supposedly were found in her system.
A panel from the Jamaican Amateur Athletic Association cleared Ottey within months, but the International Amateur Athletic Federation set aside that decision and sent Ottey's case to arbitration.
On July 3, the arbitrators lifted the ban after concluding the Swiss laboratory had improperly tested Ottey's urine sample.
The fight against drugs
Dr. Wade Exum, former drug chief of the U.S. Olympic Committee, maintains in a lawsuit that the organization allows unauthorized people to dispense performance-enhancing drugs from a pharmacy at its headquarters.
The USOC denies the accusation and denies that Exum had been asked to participate in a test of the protein enzyme ATP. The drug was to be injected into American athletes.
Exum said he objected to the testing because of what he thought was racial profiling.
The fight against drugs II
The World Anti-Doping Agency announced Thursday it has conducted more than 400 out-of-competition drug tests in the past month and plans to exceed 2,000 before the Sydney Games.
WADA also said it had signed agreements with 19 Olympic summer sports federations to allow out-of-competition testing and was still in negotiation with the nine others.
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