U.S. Needs To Get Going In This Field

Assuming you were one of the faithful few who bothered to watch the NBCit-a-day-later Olympics, your plausibly live reactions to the track and field competition no doubt include these medal-winning images: Gold - Ms. Marion Jones, a Carl Lewis you can actually like.

Silver - Our men’s 4x100-meter relay team, giving their victory lap the old Terrell Owens treatment.

Bronze - Mr. Marion Jones, pleading his drug-test innocence and buttressing his credibility by having none other than Johnnie Cochran at his side.

In this case, two out of three are bad.

And they’re the memories that will endure until the next time anybody on these shores gives a rip about the sport, just in time for the next Olympic Games in 2004.

Thank goodness we still send a boxing team to the Olympics, if only to make our track team look good by comparison.

And we haven’t even mentioned the medal count - since, technically, we’re not supposed to. After all, the Olympics is supposed to be about the taking part, our international friends tell us. It would be boorishly American to tally up the firsts, seconds and thirds. Never mind that a third-world nation might pay as much as a million dollars should one of its favorite sons win gold.

Well, this boor is here to tell you the U.S. men won all of 13 medals in track and field in Sydney. The only time we’ve done worse is in 1980, when we didn’t send a team.

No other country won more, but that may not be the case for long.

So says John Chaplin, the former Washington State University track coach who had the honor-duty-bad luck to serve as the U.S. men’s coach this Olympiad.

“The U.S. needs to come to grips with some serious problems,” he said, back on campus at Wazzu. “The rest of the world has caught up and unless we’re willing to do a few things, the slow steady decline in medals is going to continue.”

Not surprisingly, what we have to come to grips with are lawyers, drugs and money.

The Olympic coach doesn’t coach any more, really - nor is the job particularly ceremonial. He is part bureaucrat, part negotiator and, too often, fall guy. With each athlete having not only his own coach, but also an agent, attorney, accountant, masseur and - this one is optional - pharmacist, what does he possibly need with an Olympic coach?

“Michael Johnson is a multimillionaire,” Chaplin said. “He might listen to me or not. To be blunt, I’m only good for him if he wants to run the relay. I never saw him. He never had to come into the (Olympic) village. That’s nothing against Michael - that’s just the way it is.”

What Chaplin spent most of his time in Sydney doing was tracking down athletes and getting them to sign the U.S. Olympic Committee’s code of conduct, which among other things spelled out what brand of clothing they had to wear on the awards stand.

A runner might have a shoe deal with Puma. USA Track and Field, the national governing body, had a deal with Nike. The USOC was in bed with adidas.

Which is why John Chaplin spent a lot of his time in a suit and tie.

“I’d be talking to people right up to the last half hour before the event, telling them if they don’t sign the USOC deal, they would not be allowed to run,” he said. “It’s absurd. That’s no way for anybody to spend their time.”

Just as absurd was Chaplin being told by a representative of an international track club that his four athletes should run on the U.S. relay team - and then watching that same representative react bitterly when a Saudi hurdler he coaches finished second by inches to an American. Because the difference between a gold and silver medal for that Saudi, you see, was $500,000 in bonus money from his government - and, hence, in the representative’s percentage of that bonus.

“I’d say that’s a bit of a conflict of interest, wouldn’t you?” Chaplin said.

Ah, money - the root of all evil. Except that Chaplin sees the solution as being more, not less.

“The majority of the kids in the sport are amateurs,” he said, “but those at the top you wish to win medals are not. We need to get some corporations to cough up some money - like VISA did a few years ago with the decathlon. We have no coordination here. The rest of the world, frankly, is more sophisticated.

“We’re being two-bitted to death - not by any one nation, but by the whole world.”

But then, how is track to attract corporate sponsors when part of the biggest stories out of Sydney was how the U.S. didn’t reveal that Jones’ husband, C.J. Hunter, had actually been left off the team for failing four drug tests earlier this summer?

“Why should someone at General Motors attach the company’s name to something that has a negative context?” Chaplin said. “We might test more than any other nation in the world, but we haven’t made the public understand that we are for the elimination of drugs.

“Maybe we could do that if we didn’t hide the results of the tests.”

USATF officials have complained that the American legal system makes public disclosure of positive drug tests a sue-worthy offense, until a lengthy and exhaustive appeal procedure runs its course.

“Hooey,” Chaplin said.

“We have an expedited process for the relays in the Olympics,” he points out. “You get a positive test at the Games, they’ll pull you right off the field.

“Look, you hit me in the mouth with a club, I go to the police, they arrest you and indict you. They don’t say you’re guilty, but that indictment is public. Well, if your A sample tests positive, that’s an indictment. That can be announced. You’re not guilty until your B sample comes up positive, too. And you can get that done within 30 days, three days, whatever.”

And what about the lawyers?

“Too bad,” Chaplin said. “Those guys would sell their mother for a quarter - and I’ve got a son who’s one. He’s a nice kid, but I’m pretty sure selling his mother for a quarter is something he’s had to study.”

In the college catalog, it’s probably just called Olympic law.