BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS : SHE GOT IN THE LAST WORD

In an episode that the Spanish press is calling the first scandal of the Games, Sandra Myers, a Kansas native who attended Cal State Northridge and UCLA but now competes in track and field for Spain, moved out of the athletes’ village in tears this week after her husband, who also is her coach, was told that he could not continue to live there.

Before she left, she engaged in a heated exchange with the president of the Spanish track and field federation, Jose Maria Odriozola.

“What you like best is to get drunk in front of the female athletes and tell them that they are cute and other things,” she charged. “You are in athletics for the sole purpose of looking at the (posteriors) of young women.”

Odriozola demanded that she repeat the allegations in front of his wife and young son, but she declined.

Myers, third in the World Championships last year in the 400 meters, was considered Spain’s only legitimate hope for a gold medal in track and field. Because she is married to a Spaniard, Javier Echarri, she has dual citizenship that enables her to run for Spain. But she injured an Achilles’ tendon recently and was a member of the team only as a relay alternate.

When it became apparent that she probably would not compete, the Spanish track and field federation told her husband that he could not remain in the village.

“As soon as I was not useful, he kicked me out,” Myers said of Odriozola.

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.