Hearing Focuses on DeBus : Track and field: TAC panel adjourns after hearing testimony from coach accused of providing drugs to athletes.

The Athletics Congress panel hearing the case of Chuck DeBus, the Los Angeles track coach who is accused of providing drugs to athletes, adjourned without making a decision Friday, but asked attorneys for both sides to provide further documents.

The three-person panel met for more than nine hours at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport--after having also met Thursday--and heard extensive testimony from DeBus.

Craig Dummit, DeBus’ attorney, said that although the hearing had adjourned, the process was far from over.

“This is the first step of what may be a long process,” he said.

The panel asked that each attorney--Dummit and Peter Alkalay representing TAC, the governing body for track and field--provide a brief by April 16.

The hearing, originally scheduled for July 11 of last year, had been postponed or continued six times.

DeBus is charged with violating two TAC rules: providing drugs to athletes and engaging in conduct detrimental to the sport. The penalties for the drug counts call for a ban of either two years or life. On the second charge, the panel has no guidelines and may impose any sanction it wishes.

The panel gave no indication when it would make a decision. If DeBus chooses, he can appeal that decision to another committee within TAC.

DeBus, 45, has coached at UCLA and Cal State Northridge, where his teams won four national titles. He also coached the now-defunct Los Angeles Track Club, which won the TAC team title nine times. He has been under investigation by TAC for several months, since some of his former athletes made public allegations that he had offered or providing banned substances.

Despite all that has gone before, this week’s hearing was merely part of the first stage.

After several false starts, a hearing was scheduled in Los Angeles last Sept. 20. However, before the panel could meet, Dummit and Alvin Chriss, special assistant to the executive director of TAC, struck a deal. The agreement called for DeBus to be voluntarily suspended from coaching for two years but allowed him to work with athletes after seven months. There was to have been no stipulation of guilt by DeBus.

The agreement was invalidated, however, when it became clear that it had bypassed TAC’s hearing procedure. TAC had established a three-person panel to hear the case, but the panel members were not consulted before the agreement. In fact, TAC had announced the agreement before two panel members were aware that a deal had been struck.

Dummit said this week that the option still exists to seek legal enforcement of that written agreement.

All parties were adamant at the time that no side deals had been made. Dummit went so far as to send a sworn declaration to a reporter that said DeBus had never given information to TAC regarding the use of banned substances by track and field athletes.

However, a letter written five months later by DeBus and sent from Dummit to Chriss and TAC Executive Director Ollan Cassell, refers specifically to a deal in which DeBus provided TAC with names of athletes he said were drug users, in exchange for the reduced penalty.

The letter, dated Feb. 26, 1990, was transmitted from Dummit’s office in Los Angeles to the TAC office in Indianapolis. The letter provides an outline of the precise mechanism of the deals made and the leverage used by both sides.

The letter maintains that Chriss, then TAC’s representative in the case, came to L.A. several times to meet with Dummit, with the express warning that the panel members must not know of the meetings. DeBus’ letter further says that Chriss met with him and Dummit “to get names of athletes and coaches that had used banned substances, in exchange for a two-year suspension. . . . “

The letter says that some time after the deal was made, DeBus and Dummit discovered that “Chriss and Cassell wanted my information to use to blackmail specific individuals.”

The letter was also critical of the hearing process, which is restrictive for the defense.

Near the end of the nine-page letter DeBus states, “To show my sincerity and desire to rid the sport of rampant dependence on banned drugs, I am releasing the attached list of athletes, coaches and officials who I have information on. These people have either used banned substances, provided them, encouraged their known usage or failed to act when presented with solid evidence of their usage.”

The letter ends with a two-page list of 46 names of athletes, coaches, officials and doctors--mostly Americans--among them 30 Olympic medalists.

Dummit acknowledged that he had sent the letter, but said he forgot about it because TAC did not respond to it. He said he did indicate to TAC that he would release the names to the media.

“If they are so interested in finding out about drug use, why wouldn’t they be looking at these people?” Dummit asked of TAC.

Chriss said that he and Cassell met to discuss the letter, and he called many of its assertions “lies.”

“(The letter) was sent to us, as we perceived it, as a last-ditch effort at a settlement,” Chriss said this week.

Chriss acknowledged that he had said he was interested in obtaining names from DeBus, but said DeBus had little proof that the athletes he named actually had used drugs.

Some athletes formerly coached by DeBus have claimed that he either gave them drugs or suggested they take them. Olympic sprinter Diane Williams told The Times in February of 1989 that DeBus had given her drugs.

“Chuck DeBus gave me the drugs,” she said. “He’d come to practice with a white bottle with no label. There would be 50 to 100 pills inside.”

DeBus also was named in a Stern magazine article in West Germany as having advised his athletes when to go off drugs so as not to test positive. The athlete who made that assertion, Darrell Robinson, testified at the hearing Thursday.

Robinson has had his own problems since the publication of the Stern article, among them threats of lawsuits from persons he named as drug users. While Robinson was waiting in a hotel hallway to testify, he was served court papers in a libel suit.

Robinson, a 400-meter runner, was coached by DeBus from 1985-87. In the Stern article, Robinson acknowledged using steroids.

Robinson would not give details of his testimony, which took nearly five hours Thursday, but said that the process had been fair.

Asked what a fair outcome of the hearing would be, Robinson said, “He’s got to be banned, harsh as it may seem. Ben Johnson has forced people to deal with this issue. Chuck’s not a scapegoat, he’s part of the problem.”

The case is only a part of a larger and continuing drug controversy involving American athletes that has intensified since Canadian sprinter Johnson’s positive drug test at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

TAC has been under pressure to investigate allegations of widespread drug use among American athletes. Several past and current U.S. athletes were named during the Canadian drug hearings last fall. Then came the allegations in Stern in mid-September.

TAC officials met in New York soon afterward to determine a course of action.

TAC President Frank Greenberg acknowledged that a credibility gap existed, but promised action.

“I think we are going to do something that is truly enlightened,” he said.

That was more than six months ago.