Hardy-Kirk case gets another twist
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BEIJING -- Lost in the noise of the U.S. Swimming doping controversy -- and, yes, there’s been plenty -- was a simple question. Why did it take so long for swimmer Jessica Hardy’s drug test from the U.S. Olympic trials to come back?
She tested positive for the banned substance clenbuterol after the 100-meter freestyle on July 4. Hardy of Long Beach learned of the positive result on July 21. This became an issue on Thursday afternoon when a couple of us reporters, Norm Frauenheim of the Arizona Republic and myself, had a brief chat with USA Swimming’s head team coach Mark Schubert. Maybe one day there will be conversation with Schubert where we don’t talk about the Hardy case or high-tech swim suits.
In any event, we were at the Speedo Sports Club at the Jintai Art Museum at Chaoyang Park, a most peaceful setting. (There will be more to report from the session later on about the U.S. swimmers.)
‘The obvious solution is timely testing,’ Schubert said. ‘To be honest, I don’t think we ever contemplated ever getting the drug results later than July 11, than when we asked for them. We were paying for expedited results.’
He could not remember receiving drug tests so late in the game, so to speak.
‘That would be a question for [the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency], because they’re a third-party vendor of the USOC,’ Schubert said. ‘We can’t dictate to them. We can only request.’
He said he has not received an explanation for the delay, but also noted he has been out of the country. (The Times has sent an e-mail about the late test result to USADA’s Chief Executive Travis Tygart.)
Schubert had said he could speak specifically after Tara Kirk’s arbitration hearing, which he was involved in, via telephone, on Tuesday night. USA Swimming’s selection process was upheld after a long session.
Kirk, who finished third in the 100-meter breaststroke, wrote about the matter on her blog at wcsn.com:
Yesterday I participated in arbitration on this whole crazy situation. It was long and tough and not very enjoyable but it was something that had to be done. At the end of it all, the Arbitrator found that the system was flawed and that that flawed system was applied to me and I suffered from it. He felt that he did not have the power to name me to the Olympic team because USA Swimming did not go outside of its rules to avoid naming me to the team, but that I still may have cause to ask for damages and a rule change. Since there isn’t a lot of urgency to these two things, the Arbitrator has set the matter over for at least a month, and I am going to think about picking them up at a later point to avoid being a distraction to the team. It’s disappointing but not devastating. I haven’t had a great track record of things going my way lately, but I still feel that we made progress. Not as much as I would like and not as much as I feel that I deserve, but progress nonetheless. I wouldn’t say that the decision suggests that USA Swimming was right in what it did. It simply means that we can’t turn back time on what happened and make me an 2008 Olympian as I should be.
Additionally, Swimming World magazine obtained a letter from USA Swimming’s executive director Chuck Wielgus to his staff on the arbitration case. Here is a link to his letter. Wielgus may not have admitted in the letter that changes to the selection process are needed. But these excerpts show that Schubert did acknowledge the most obvious point:
‘I think we need to name alternates in every event, and I think those alternates need a commitment to train,’ he said. ‘Then we need to work out, with the organizing committee and with FINA, if there’s a positive test, how a replacement could happen and if we could have some type of an exception to the entry deadline. If something like this were to happen in the future. It wouldn’t be unlike what we asked [breaststroker] Scott Usher to do. Because we weren’t sure what the diagnosis was going to be for Eric [Shanteau], whether he was going to be cleared to compete. At the end of the trials we asked him to make a commitment to train, which he did right up until the 21st. We got daily reports from his coach and from him. Ideally, I can’t speak for the committee but that would be my recommendation in the future as to how we’d handle this situation.’
-- Lisa Dillman
