Olympic Team Reeling From Series Of Mishaps

The road to Atlanta has been littered with potholes so far for athletes and officials trying to put together the U.S. team for this summer’s Olympics.

While it may have been the most tragic, the shooting death of wrestler Dave Schultz last week was only the latest in a series of blows against a squad that is expected to dominate on its home turf.

A failed drug test by a teen-age swimming star, the death of a beloved leader, a nasty spat over ethics in the race to be the next USOC president, even the arrest of a canoeist as he practiced in a storm-swollen river - all these incidents and more have diverted attention from preparations for the Games, now just six months away.

“We’re stressing to our athletes, coaches and administrators, ‘Keep your eyes focused on the goal,’ and that’s Atlanta,” U.S. Olympic Committee executive director Dick Schultz said.

That message, he said, would be underscored when U.S. team leaders of each sport meet in the Olympic city Feb. 16-18 to review logistics and other preparations.

“These things you can’t predict. A lot of it goes with the territory,” Schultz said. “But you need to have a disaster plan in place so that when things happen you can deal with them quickly and keep your attention from drifting.”

This certainly is not the first time outside events involving U.S. athletes have captured the spotlight in the run-up to the Games.

Back in 1936, swimmer Eleanor Holms was kicked off the team for drinking and shooting dice on the ocean liner to Berlin. Two full teams - figure skaters in 1961, boxers in 1980 - were killed in plane crashes. Before the 1992 Games, hurdler Butch Reynolds and track’s world leaders warred in court over drug tests; two years later, skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan captured headlines after Kerrigan was attacked by thugs linked to her archrival.

When the sideshow seems about to take over the center ring, it’s time to get back to basics, officials said.

“You tell the people that the distractions are not why they are on the team. You tell them you are on the team because you are an athlete and you have a great talent,” said Harvey Schiller, president of Turner Sports and USOC executive director during the HardingKerrigan affair.

“You try to direct their attention back to the sport.”

In recent months, need for such direction has been almost constant.

Dave Schultz, a wrestling gold medalist in 1984 and a top contender to make his second Olympic team at age 37, was gunned down on the Pennsylvania estate of chemical heir John E. du Pont, who has been charged in the death.

Besides being a high-profile murder case involving a member of one of the nation’s richest families, Schultz’s death has focused attention on the financing and training of America’s Olympic athletes. Schultz was among a handful of leading wrestlers supported by du Pont, who also was a prime underwriter of USA Wrestling, which picks the Olympic team.

“Most people think of Olympic athletes as having money, but unless it’s a sport like basketball or track and field that’s not the case,” said Chris Campbell, a bronze-medal wrestler in 1992 and a member of the USOC’s executive committee.

A memorial service for Schultz will be held in Philadelphia Feb. 11. That same day, an appeals panel of U.S. Swimming will meet in Orlando, Fla., to decide whether to suspend the youngest U.S. athlete ever to flunk a drug test.

Jessica Foschi, a 15-year-old from Old Brookville, N.Y., tested positive for steroids at the national championships in August. She was placed on two years’ probation in December but allowed to keep competing, and she has shown good progress toward a freestyle berth in Atlanta - a possibility that could cause repercussions in a sport acutely sensitive to doping charges.

Foschi has denied using drugs and her family has hired a lawyer, who could take the case to court.

Already in court is Davey Hearn, a world champion whitewater canoeist from Bethesda, Md., and a favorite for an Olympic gold medal. Hearn was charged with resisting arrest and failing to obey a U.S. Park Police officer when he took his canoe last month into the raging Potomac, 15 feet higher than normal following record winter storms.

“We don’t want to get in a ruckus with the Park Police and not be able to train on the river at all,” Hearn said. “But it’s unclear to us where they have the power to close the river. We think once you’re on the water, you’re on your own.”

If a river runs through Hearn’s Olympic preparations, the USOC’s velodrome at the foot of Pike’s Peak is the key to American cyclists’ gold-medal hopes. And the cyclists are upset by a decision to allow their chief rivals from Australia to use the track in the treasured practice time before Atlanta.

That argument between the two nations’ cycling federations lasted weeks and reached all the way to the International Olympic Committee before the USOC decided that international cooperation and avoiding possible retaliation in Sydney before the 2000 Games took precedence over home-field edge.

As the USOC prepares to field an Olympic team, it’s also preparing to pick a new leader. The process to find a successor to LeRoy T. Walker as president next October hit rough water over charges that two members of the nominating committee had ties to the top contender, Colorado Springs business leader Bill Hybl. A high-profile ethics inquiry cleared all of wrongdoing, but it was another unwelcome intrusion at a busy time.

In the midst of all this came perhaps the hardest blow for many in the Olympic community - the death of Col. F. Donald Miller, the USOC’s former executive director.

Miller, who spent more than four decades in Olympic affairs, generally was credited with saving the USOC in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when money and public support were running low. His death, even after a long bout with cancer, left many in the USOC community shaken and grieving.

It was one more downer at a time when Olympic spirits should be looking up.

“When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you just try to get out of the way of the truck,” Dick Schultz said. “But as long as you can maintain your focus, you’ll be OK.”