COMMENTARY : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 13 : A Night of Whine and Roses : Track and field: Those targeted by Torrence respond. It puts a damper on festivities.

They held a track meet here Thursday night and a news conference broke out.

On a night when the United States won four Olympic gold medals, missed a fifth when its female star hit the last hurdle while well ahead of the field and watched proudly while its decathlon star heroically limped to a bronze medal on a stress fracture in his right foot, some of the most heated action took place underneath the Olympic stadium at that news conference.

And what a news conference it was. It featured vulgarity, slander and racism. It was controversial and confrontational. It was a frenzy of finger-pointing and name-calling. This was better head-to-head action than they had at the boxing venue.

The scene was set when American Gwen Torrence won the 200 meters and was followed across the finish line by Jamaicans Juliet Cuthbert and Merlene Ottey. All had been in Saturday’s 100 meters, with Torrence missing a medal in fourth place, Cuthbert getting a silver medal and with Ottey farther back.

After the 100, Torrence had told reporters that some of the people in the 100 final were users of performance-enhancing drugs. Because she wasn’t specific, all were presumed guilty, including gold medalist Gail Devers of the United States and bronze medalist Irina Privalova of the Commonwealth of Independent States, who finished fourth in the 200.

So, when Torrence strolled into the interview room Thursday, flanked by Cuthbert and Ottey, the pot was still simmering. A few questions later, it was boiling over.

She was asked if she and Devers were friends, if they had talked since Torrence’s statements of last Saturday. Torrence seemed to have included Devers in her drug-user indictment, then seemed to back off that.

“No, we have had no conversation,” Torrence said. “We’ve never been friends. We talk, but we aren’t friends. We’ve been stretching in the same area here. She’s upset because I said the things I said at the Olympic Games. Actually, she doesn’t exactly know what I said. But it’s over now, done with. We all had our say.”

Uh-huh.

“It’s not over,” said Cuthbert, taking over the microphone without being asked a question. “I know this: I tested negative. I’ll also tell you that you (referring to Torrence without looking at her, seated just three feet to her left) said those things and put me on such a high and low. The second question my mother asked me when I talked to her after the race was if I was on drugs.

“You said it, and then everybody else was saying it. I had people in the village asking me one stupid question after another about drugs.”

Torrence tried to answer that, and went on yet another diatribe about all the druggies in sports.

Then Cuthbert, who had been assured by Torrence that she was not one of those Torrence had mentioned in her initial outburst, was asked exactly who Torrence told her she was talking about.

“Privalova and Devers,” Cuthbert said, without a moment’s pause.

Suddenly, joint slander.

Devers’ coach, Bob Kersee, upon hearing that on the closed-circuit TV telecast in the media area of the stadium, headed directly for the news conference, fully intending to grab the microphone and join the debate. He was talked out of that by his sister-in-law, Florence Griffith Joyner, and his wife, Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Meanwhile, Torrence entertained the fast-growing, rather-amazed group of reporters with some crude philosophy sprinkled with gutter language. Many of the broadcasters had tape recorders or cameras on. Not much of what she said figures to make the 11 o’clock news.

Then, quickly, Torrence shifted the focus of her attack to Katrin Krabbe, the German sprinter who beat Torrence for the gold medal in both the 100 and 200 in the World Championships last August in Tokyo. Krabbe didn’t run here, reportedly because she recently tested positive for drug use. The black female sprinters call Krabbe “Miss Hope,” as in “Great White Hope.”

“In Tokyo, after she beat me, she came over to hug me and I started to hug her back,” Torrence said. “And then I stopped myself and I said, ‘What am I doing? I don’t hug cheaters!’ ”

Quickly, Cuthbert took the floor: “They’ll get Krabbe back in. She’ll be back. She’s the Great White Hope.”

And then Ottey got in her jabs: “Remember, the World Championships are in Germany next year. They’ll get her back for that.”

Soon, they were discussing boycotting the World Championships if Krabbe runs and Torrence was saying that she would do it if Ottey did because she was somewhat of a spokesman for the group. Then they said that the solution to all of this would be blood tests, and Torrence said she’d have hers done right there in front of reporters if that helped, even though she hated needles.

Eventually, this theater of the absurd moved outside, to a counter diatribe by Kersee, Devers’ coach, who shouted and, at one point, threw a water bottle in mid-sentence, apparently a kind of personal punctuation.

“If there is anybody in the world who deserves to come and enjoy an Olympics, it’s Gail Devers,” Kersee said. “Here she is, falling over a hurdle and crawling on the ground to get across the finish line. That’s what the Olympics are all about.

“It’s not about slandering somebody who finishes higher than you in a race. Gail would crawl over the finish line to finish a race for the USA, but nobody from the (United States Olympic Committee) will even stand up for her.

“They all sit up there in the fat red box, and let Gwen say whatever she wants and nobody will confront her.”

There was more, much more. But you get the drift.

It was a night of many golden moments for the United States, which once again demonstrated that it has track athletes who can run faster, jump higher and whine louder than any others in the world.