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Sunday, October 1
Will lawyers be the next Olympians?


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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