WORLD SPORTS SCENE / RANDY HARVEY : Reynolds Case a Test of Nebiolo’s Power

What happened to cause Italian Primo Nebiolo, president of track and field’s international federation, to back off his threat to suspend every 400-meter runner who competes against the “contaminated” Butch Reynolds this week in the U.S. Olympic trials?

We might have to wait for his book, or someone else’s, to discover the truth behind Sunday’s announcement that Nebiolo is now recommending that the IAAF Council vote to waive the so-called contamination rule that prohibits competition against suspended athletes.

The best guess from people who have followed Nebiolo’s career as an international sports leader is that he wanted to test his power. He discovered that it has its limits, but not before he had his position heard before the U.S. Supreme Court.

All in all, it was not a bad performance for Nebiolo, although he had greater success earlier this year when he bullied the International Olympic Committee into including him among its membership by threatening to withhold sanctioning of South Africa’s track and field athletes for this summer’s Olympics at Barcelona.

It is also possible that Nebiolo got something else from the Reynolds affair besides the satisfaction of making so many lawyers dance.

Considering that Nebiolo has been pressuring the IOC to give the IAAF a larger share of its revenue from the Summer Olympics, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, aware that NBC-TV would like to have the best possible U.S. team at Barcelona, told Nebiolo that he could only hurt his cause by maintaining such a hard-line stance. In that scenario, it would have been understood that Nebiolo could help his cause by relenting.

Whatever occurred over the international phone lines between New Orleans, Switzerland and Italy, one thing that has become increasingly clear is that Nebiolo is the most Machiavellian Italian since, well, Machiavelli.

“Nebiolo is the most transparently ambitious member of the so-called ‘club’ of key world sports leaders, and if he has not achieved the IOC presidency by 75, he will probably have the retirement rule amended to 85,” writes one of the most astute observers of the IAAF, Cliff Temple of the London Times.

Nebiolo, 69, will “surely not be content to remain a mere member. For him to have come so far without trying to wrest the ultimate honor would be like climbing to within five feet of Everest’s peak and then going back down.”

Aside from the increasingly high visibility of lawyers, the most distressing development at the U.S. track and field trials is the apparent return of banned drugs after a three-year hiatus, during which many athletes’ performances withered at the same rate as their muscles.

U.S. track and field officials credited their year-round, random-testing program, which required athletes to report for inspection of their urine within 48 hours of being called.

But, according to coaches familiar with the sports drug scene, athletes have discovered a masking agent, which has a high sugar content and supposedly skews test results. A mail-order product, it is advertised as a defense against drug testing in the workplace.

“Some of these athletes have gotten so big in the last six months that I hardly recognize them,” said one coach, who did not want to be identified. “They’re not fooling anybody, but I don’t think they care as long as they don’t get caught. They just want to get to the Olympics.”

Although the German track and field federation’s legal commission cleared world sprint champion Katrin Krabbe and two other runners of charges that they manipulated a drug test by submitting samples that all came from the same clean donor, the IAAF is not expected to lift their suspensions in an upcoming hearing.

It did not help their causes when the German track and field federation repudiated the findings of its legal commission, so angering the chairman of the commission that he resigned.

One of the world’s leading drug-testing experts, Manfred Donike of Cologne, Germany, has told the IAAF that two of the women involved, Krabbe and Grit Breuer, also submitted like samples in a test six weeks before last year’s World Championships.

Also, a German businessman told Spiegel magazine that the coach for the three women, Thomas Springstein, confessed to him that he manipulated the samples and that he gave his athletes performance-enhancing drugs without their knowledge.

Carl Lewis’ failure to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team in the 100 meters virtually guarantees that Finland’s Paavo Nurmi, who competed in distance events in the 1920, ’24 and ’28 Summer Olympics, will remain for at least another four years the only track and field athlete to win nine gold medals.

Lewis, who won six in the sprints and long jump in 1984 and ‘88, could still compete at Barcelona in the long jump, 200 meters and 400-meter relay. But, although he said that he would welcome Lewis to a training camp next month in France, where the relay teams will be selected, U.S. men’s Coach Mel Rosen said that he does not expect Lewis to appear. “I think he’ll want to concentrate on the long jump and the 200,” Rosen said.