WORLD SPORTS SCENE : Romania’s Ivan May Be Here After All

After Olympic 1,500-meter champion Paula Ivan accepted an invitation to run the mile in the Jan. 19 Sunkist Invitational at the Sports Arena, Romanian track and field officials said she couldn’t go. But now, since the Romanian revolution, those officials are out, and she might be back in.

It couldn’t have come at a better time for meet promoter Al Franken, who is counting on Ivan as a major attraction.

Vladimir Moraru, a former Romanian sportswriter who defected to the United States in 1984 and now lives in Glendale, spoke by telephone Wednesday with Ivan’s coach, Maricica Puica, former Olympic 3,000-meter champion, who said that all she needs to bring Ivan to Los Angeles is another invitation. Franken was working on that Wednesday through The Athletics Congress, which governs track and field in the United States.

Franken has offered $100,000 to the winners of the men’s and women’s miles if they break the world indoor records. His guarantee is insured by a company in Dallas, which charged him premiums of $12,000 for the women’s race and $7,000 for the men’s race. But if Ivan doesn’t show, he expects a substantial refund on the women’s premium.

The government of Nicolae Ceausescu might have done too well in training some athletes. Pistol shooters Sorin Babii and Ion Cornelu, both Olympic medalists, reportedly lined up on the pro-democracy side during the revolution and helped defend an important military target.

Another athlete who took up arms against Ceausescu’s state police, former Romanian rugby captain Radu Durbac, died in the fighting.

Dynamo Bucharest, the Romanian soccer team that was sponsored by the state police, has reorganized and changed its name to Unirea Tricolor.

Nadia Watch: U.S. gymnast Kurt Thomas, once a close friend of Nadia Comaneci, said he believes she hasn’t contacted her former coach, Bela Karolyi, since arriving in the United States because she believes he deceived her when he defected in 1981.

“Nadia wanted to defect with him, but Bela discouraged her by saying he wasn’t ready, either,” Thomas told the Chicago Tribune. “Then Bela didn’t show up at the airport for the plane (to Romania), and the rest is history. I can understand Bela’s point. He didn’t want to be responsible for taking an 18-year-old national hero with him.”

Elsewhere on the Bloc, Katarina Witt’s coach, Jutta Mueller, threatened to go to the West to teach figure skaters unless the East Germans made it possible for her to make as much money at home. As a result, the East Germans will allow skaters from the West to come to her rink in Karl Marx-Stadt. It won’t be long before all of East Germany’s sports facilities are open to Western athletes in exchange for fees.

Meantime, Witt said she had made a mistake when she defended the former East German government in recent interviews. Upon returning home from filming a movie in Spain and reading about the corruption in former leader Erich Honecker’s government, she said on West German television, “I fell from one faint into another and simply couldn’t believe it.”

She also said that she will consider leaving East Germany if harassment of athletes by their former fans doesn’t end.

“It hurts very much when someone says, ‘You athletes were the privileged ones. I find this terribly unfair, to throw us into a pot with people who really did some ugly things. . . . If people (continue to be) malicious, I shall pack my bags and leave.”

For 36 years, East Germany staged a formal ceremony to honor its sportsmen and sportswomen of the year. The cost in 1988 was $23,500. In December, the ceremony consisted of the winners, gymnast Andreas Wacker and swimmer Kristin Otto, receiving their awards in a drab television studio during halftime of a team handball match. Both wore blue jeans.

Unlike the old regime, the new leadership in East German sports supports a combined East Berlin-West Berlin bid for the Summer Olympics in either 2000 or 2004. If the Chinese prove incapable of organizing the Asian Games in Beijing later this year, bet on Berlin for 2000.

The International Amateur Athletic Federation, which governs track and field, will decide on Jan. 19 whether to strip Ben Johnson of his world record. The IAAF voted last summer that it has the right to do so because he admitted using anabolic steroids in training for the world record he set in 1987.

A London newspaper reported last month that boxing promoter Bob Arum is organizing a $3.2-million race between Johnson and Carl Lewis on Sept. 25 in Barcelona. That’s the day Johnson’s two-year suspension ends. But Lewis’ manager, Joe Douglas of the Santa Monica Track Club, denies that Arum is involved.

“I am having discussions with a U.S. boxing promoter, but it is not Arum,” he said.

High hurdler Roger Kingdom is Track & Field News’ male athlete of the year for 1989. The only other American in the top 10 was triple jumper Mike Conley.

Nominations for the idle threat of the year begin and end here: The international soccer federation (FIFA) said that Argentina’s Diego Maradona might be banned from this year’s World Cup in Italy because he alleged that the draw to determine the first-round pairings was fixed.

Defending him is Milan’s respected newspaper, Corriere della Sera, which wrote that he only said “what many had thought and some had let be understood between the lines. It has long been known that the World Cup draws are skillfully predetermined, but nobody ever protested. Now that Maradona, Mr. Disagreeable, said it openly, it’s too easy to attack him.”

Maradona said he will apologize, but not recant. He was suspicious because host Italy was drawn into the easiest group, which includes the United States.

The United States begins training for the World Cup with a camp scheduled for Jan. 5-18 in LaJolla. Twenty-eight players were invited.

Not among them is Ricky Davis, the United States’ leading goal scorer in international competition. He has not played with the national team since the Seoul Olympics because of injuries.

UCLA midfielder Chris Henderson didn’t play with the team last year in World Cup qualifying but has been invited to camp.

Thirty prospects for the 1992 U.S. Olympic soccer team, which actually is an under-23 team, will gather from Jan. 5-13 in Ontario.

U.S. freestyle wrestlers are on the verge of catching the Soviets, who have dominated the sport. In seven matches against the Soviets last month in Pittsburgh, the Americans won five. That included a victory for John Smith, 24, Olympic and two-time world champion at 136.5 pounds, over Sergei Beloglazov, 33, a two-time Olympic and six-time world champion at 125.5 pounds.

Besides being younger, Smith had an advantage because they wrestled at his weight. A crowd of 9,690 watched.

In Greco-Roman wrestling, two Americans won World Cup titles in November. One was Gogi Parseghian of San Clemente, who emigrated to the United States from Armenia in the Soviet Union. He could have his U.S. citizenship in time for the 1992 Summer Olympics.

In an international survey conducted by Italy’s largest sports daily newspaper, Gazetta dello Sports, Carl Lewis was voted the male athlete of the ‘80s. Runners-up, in order, were Maradona, Wayne Gretzky and Mike Tyson.

In voting for the female athlete of the ‘80s, Martina Navratilova was first, Steffi Graf second and East German track star Marita Koch third.