WORLD SPORTS SCENE / RANDY HARVEY : French Track Star Hides Out in Westwood

It did not take long for John Smith to replace one Olympic gold medalist with another on the track at Westwood. Quincy Watts, the men’s 400-meter champion from 1992, is out. Marie-Jose Perec, the women’s 400-meter champion from 1992, is in.

Perec, expected to begin working out with Smith this week, told French newspapers that she came to Southern California for the sun, but it is just as likely she is attempting to escape the heat in France.

France’s only track and field medalist at Barcelona, she could outrun everyone in the country except the media. When her agent, Tom Sturak of Topanga Canyon, told her that Carl Lewis could walk down the street in Westwood without being recognized by more than one of every 10 persons he passed, she did not consider that a negative.

It is possible that Perec could open her outdoor season in the April 17 Mt. San Antonio College Relays at Walnut.

Watts, meantime, left Smith for Bob Kersee and is working out at various San Fernando Valley locations near his home in Calabasas.

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Encouraging news for track and field’s May 22 New York Games is that CBS will offer same-day coverage. Discouraging news is that the meet lost a major sponsor last week and has been forced to cut back to 10 official events, the minimum required to qualify as part of the Mobil Grand Prix circuit.

That is not likely to win the meet any points with the International Amateur Athletic Federation, which, taking everything into consideration from hotel accommodations and food for athletes to the quality of the competition, ranked the New York Games 12th among 16 Grand Prix meets last summer. The only other Grand Prix meet in the United States, the Bruce Jenner Invitational at San Jose, ranked last.

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Franziska van Almsick, 15, is the first swimmer from eastern Germany in two decades to emerge as an international star who was not a product of her former country’s sports machine.

Her mother is a former East German sports official who did not apologize last year when she confessed that she spied on athletes for the country’s secret police, but the young van Almsick developed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and has not been tainted by politics.

After winning six gold medals and a silver in the 1993 European Championships, she was named Swimming World’s Female Swimmer of the Year. But she said she was more honored when she was voted Germany’s most popular woman athlete in a poll taken among teen-age girls by a national sports magazine. Steffi Graf finished second.

During a ceremony last Thursday night at Los Angeles’ Amateur Athletic Foundation, where she received the World Trophy as the best athlete from Europe, van Almsick apologized for her limited knowledge of English. “The first foreign language we learned in East Berlin was Russian,” she said.

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An automatic five-tenths deduction to the U.S. Figure Skating Assn.: Two weeks after Brian Boitano informed USFSA officials that he was withdrawing from the Hershey’s Kisses Pro-Am on Thursday and Friday at the Sports Arena because of a groin injury, advertisements in Los Angeles continue to include him among the competitors. If Boitano appears, it will be only to perform an exhibition routine.

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Before last month’s World Championships, Japan’s Yuka Sato said that it would be difficult for her to get a break from the judges because figure skating is “still a white person’s sport.”

Fortunately, she knows more about skating than she does about her sport’s recent history. Women’s world champions in the last nine years include African-American Debi Thomas in 1986, Japanese Midori Ito in ‘89, Asian-American Kristi Yamaguchi in ’91 and ’92 and now Sato.

The temper tantrum France’s Surya Bonaly threw after finishing second to Sato was not her first. After seeing her scores in the 1990 World Championships, she cupped her hands around her mouth and booed the judges.

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Shaquille O’Neal’s appearance as a member of Dream Team II in this summer’s World Championships at Toronto will be the second time he has participated in a USA Basketball event. In the 1990 U.S. Olympic Festival, he averaged 24.5 points, 13.8 rebounds, 6.8 blocks and set 14 Festival records.

While Dream Team II players take a break after the NBA season, other teams will be preparing for the World Championships in the July 23-Aug. 7 Goodwill Games at St. Petersburg, Russia, where the U.S. team consist of collegians. If Purdue’s Glenn Robinson does not turn pro, he no doubt will be U.S. Coach George Raveling’s first choice for the team that will be named next month.