COLUMN ONE : Athlete’s Quest for Lost Gold : After taking a banned drug, David Kiley is fighting to get the gold medals back for his teammates. His campaign comes at a time when disabled sports is boasting an air of professionalism.

David Kiley awoke in pain.

Stabbing, gripping, tormenting pain.

What Kiley did next changed his life as the world’s greatest wheelchair basketball player. He took a red, spiral-shaped painkiller and hoped that the burning in his legs would stop.

Now, he regrets taking anything that morning, 50 hours before the United States won the gold medal at the 1992 Paralympic Games in Barcelona.

He regrets it because shortly after the U.S. victory, Kiley tested positive for a banned drug. He was accused of cheating and the Americans were stripped of their medal.

Eleven teammates who worked so hard for that golden moment had it taken away because of David Kiley’s pain.

And that has hurt most of all.

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For the past two years, Kiley, a former Orange County basketball star living in San Dimas, has waged a one-man crusade to get the medals back for his teammates--an effort that has entangled him in the multilayered bureaucracy of the disabled sports world and placed him at the middle of the controversy over whether disabled athletes should be subjected to the same drug-testing rules that govern their able-bodied peers.

Kiley’s campaign has come to a head at a time when disabled sports has outgrown its back-yard recreation mentality to boast an air of professionalism with sponsorship, financial backing and fan interest.

In the multimillion-dollar game of international sport, the disabled are seeking their share of the fortune.

Disabled athletes and officials have long sought more respect and recognition, saying they are in most ways equal to the able-bodied.

In an effort to prove their point, officials began limited drug testing at the 1988 Paralympics, a quadrennial event that showcases six categories of disabled athletes in competitions from wheelchair basketball to track and field.

They adopted the International Olympic Committee’s list of banned substances, an array of drugs from anabolic steroids to over-the-counter nasal sprays.

As a result, they were confronted with the two sides of drug testing: catching those who take performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids and amphetamines but penalizing unsuspecting athletes who take cold preparations, asthma medications and mild painkillers.

The able-bodied athletic world has wrestled with this issue since drug testing was introduced at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

For disabled athletes such as Kiley, the issue has added complications because their physical conditions might require medications that the able-bodied could function without.

“We’re still handicapped. We need our own set of drug rules,” said Anardo Valdez, Kiley’s teammate on the 1992 U.S. Paralympic basketball team.

Perhaps the most poignant symbols of the battle are the gold medals--being held by the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation in Sheffield, England, until the dispute is settled.

Initially, the American players had refused to turn over their medals because they were so angry--at first with Kiley and their coach, then at the system. They had done nothing wrong, so why were they being punished? they asked.

Only after international officials threatened to bar members of the team from the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta were the gold medals returned.

All except one.

Valdez, a former Marine from New York who played for two decades, refused.

“I don’t think that medal should leave America,” Valdez said. “We won it.”

He was banned for life by the U.S. Wheelchair Basketball Assn.

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When drug testing was started in 1988, it was modeled after the International Olympic Committee’s program. Significantly, the disabled leaders left no avenue to appeal decisions--an accepted procedure in other international sports.

Still, in March, 1993, Kiley and the U.S. disabled sports team were granted a hearing before the now defunct International Coordination Committee of World Sports Organizations for the Disabled, the group that ran the Barcelona Games. The ICC upheld the decision to disqualify the Americans.

That ended the saga until the wheelchair basketball community got a copy of the minutes from the ICC’s meeting. They learned that ICC officials voted to uphold the decision before the U.S. delegation was heard.

The reason Kiley took the drug did not matter to them, said Bob Steadward of Edmonton, Canada, president of the International Paralympic Committee that has replaced the defunct ICC. As an ICC official, Steadward introduced the proposal to uphold the U.S. disqualification before the hearing and has emerged as a hard-liner in Kiley’s case.

“He was tested. It was positive. It was on the banned list,” Steadward said. “Every athlete could come up with all sorts of reasons (for using the drug).”

In fact, others did. Another disabled athlete caught at Barcelona was Leon Labuschagne, a discus thrower from South Africa. Labuschagne was allowed to keep his gold medal because he tested positive for a banned substance that was taken over a long period to treat hypertension.

If nothing else, Kiley, 41, believes his reasons for taking the painkiller deserved consideration when meting out punishment.

Unlike some athletes, he never contested the drug test’s results: “I should have known what I was taking. There is no excuse for it, and I won’t make any,” he said at his office at Casa Colina Rehabilitation Center in Pomona, where he is director of wheelchair sports.

But then the punishment was handed down--a two-year suspension for Kiley and disqualification for his team.

“Ben Johnson (Canadian sprinter) got a two-year suspension for steroids, and this little trace of (a painkiller) cost the team a gold medal,” Kiley said. “There was no intent whatsoever for anything other than to take my person out of pain. It served no purpose in that gold medal game.

“The fact that my teammates lost their gold medals is totally unacceptable,” he said, adding that he is prepared to give up his medal for the sake of the others.

It appears that he is finally making headway. The IPC executive committee agreed last month to appear before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. The court, created by the International Olympic Committee, is expected to hear the case early next year.

The International Olympic Committee, perhaps the world’s most influential amateur sports organization, persuaded the IPC to agree to arbitration after IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch was petitioned by the U.S. Olympic Committee on Kiley’s behalf.

For disabled athletics to gain a foothold in the established sporting world, they need IOC support--and money. That gave Samaranch leverage to force the IPC to resolve Kiley’s case.

Yet, resistance lingers.

“I’m really surprised (the Americans) made a decision to continue to pursue a situation that had already been duly adjudicated,” Steadward said. “We’ve forgotten about it and gone on to more important matters.”

If they thought Kiley would simply forget about it, they did not know him.

Not only has Kiley been an outstanding basketball player and skier, he has scaled Guadalupe Peak, Texas’ highest mountain at 8,751 feet. At times, he crawled across rocks while dragging a wheelchair and gear by a rope clenched in his teeth.

He brought the same determination to the dispute.

When he returned from Barcelona, his sponsors were not sure whether to promote him as a gold medal winner or ignore him as a cheater. A wheelchair manufacturer sponsor left him off its poster of American gold medalists.

“That just killed me,” Kiley said. “The first year and a half I’d come to tears a few times a week. It could be a conversation, it could be a thought, something I was reading.”

During the first three months after the drug test, Kiley spent most of his day trying to find a way to get his case heard. He spent so much time on it he ignored his job and his wife, Sandy, and their children, Justin, 14, and Danielle, 10.

“It made things much more tense in our household,” Kiley said. “I was consumed by it.”

An ill-tempered competitor likened to tennis great John McEnroe, Kiley often incensed officials by not mincing words. More than a year ago, he called officials “a bunch of able-bodied demigods who don’t have a closeness to the sport.”

Kiley amassed thick files of paperwork on his case that he has sent to all of his ’92 teammates.

Next year Kiley plans to run for commissioner of the U.S. National Wheelchair Basketball Assn. against Stan Labanowich, the commissioner who suspended him but who also is trying to help win an appeal. Kiley realized that the only way to change the system was to become involved in the process.

Kiley said if he loses the arbitration, and the election, he will try to compete in his sixth Paralympics at Atlanta. He was a member of two gold medal winning wheelchair basketball teams before 1992 and also won medals in skiing competitions in the Winter Paralympics. He had planned to retire after Barcelona, but the loss of the medal has fueled his competitive drive.

“It doesn’t go away,” he said.

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Kiley, a sandy-haired man with a baritone voice, is a 14-time All-American who became one of the greatest symbols of the disabled leading active lives.

A basketball star at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, Kiley damaged his spinal cord in 1973 when riding down the snow on an inner tube that slammed, back-first, into a tree in the San Bernardino Mountains. The accident left him partially paralyzed from the waist down.

Throughout his endeavors, Kiley suffered excruciating pain in his back and legs because his spinal cord is only partially severed. He often took mild painkillers to deaden the pain.

In Barcelona, the pain was so bad one day that Kiley’s coach, Harry Vines, gave him a Darvocet, a prescription painkiller containing the banned narcotic Darvon. Kiley did not take the medication immediately because he had a game the next day. Painkillers can slow the reflexes and affect play.

But two days before the United States played its gold-medal game against the Netherlands, Kiley awoke at 2:30 a.m. with the intense pain in his legs.

He took the pill, as he had done hundreds of times before. Although pharmacologists say Darvon is not performance-enhancing and its analgesic effect lasts only six hours, a trace amount was found in Kiley’s system about 50 hours later.

Playing his worst game of the Paralympics, Kiley scored five points as the United States defeated the Netherlands for the gold medal, 39-36. Afterward, Kiley was selected for testing.

Of the 3,600 athletes at the ’92 Paralympics, 225 were required to provide urine samples for drug tests. Only the gold medal winners were tested, said Phil Craven, president of the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation. Kiley said the athletes had little information about the selection process.

Kiley said he thought banned drugs meant anabolic steroids or other performance-enhancing substances. It did not occur to him, he said, that other families of drugs such as painkillers also were banned.

American athletes were sent literature, given lectures and shown a film about drug testing, U.S. officials said. But the film was shown on the team charter to Barcelona. The wheelchair basketball team was not on the plane.

Not even Craven, IWBF president, understood the drug-testing regulations in Barcelona.

“The rules were so scant,” said Craven, who has become a strong critic of the current drug program.

After what happened to Kiley, Craven adopted the drug-testing policies of the international governing body for basketball. The program has a standard appeals process and sanctioning policy.

Drug testing has brought a sophistication to disabled sports. But the competitions really began as a method of rehabilitation.

The Paralympics have been held since 1960, usually around the time of the Summer and Winter Games, though not always in the same city or country.

But in 1988, the event was held a month after the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, ushering a new era of disabled athletics. The disabled used many of the facilities built for the Seoul Games, and for the first time felt like part of the international sports community. Limited drug testing was introduced although Kiley, who helped the United States win a gold medal, said he did not know of any basketball players who were tested.

The Barcelona Games were held on an even larger scale four years later and the Atlanta Paralympics is expected to be the biggest yet, with about 4,000 athletes representing 100 countries in 16 sports. The IPC has a $50-million budget to produce the games in conjunction with Atlanta Committee to Organize the Games, the local organizing committee for the ’96 Summer Olympics. For the first time the marketing of a Paralympics will be coordinated with the Olympics.

The Paralympics, which is different from the participation-oriented Special Olympics, bring together competitors from six international organizations, including those representing blind players and the wheelchair-bound.

As the Paralympics grew it became evident that disabled athletes needed some drug regulations of their own.

“Just because we’re disabled athletes doesn’t make us morally pure,” said David Efferson of Castro Valley, Calif., a member of the ’92 U.S. team.

Officials hoped that by implementing drug testing in Barcelona they could deter use of banned substances. When Kiley tested positive, they had caught one of the Games’ superstars.

“They wanted to make a strong statement but they set their feet on the wrong example,” said Paul DePace, chairman of the National Wheelchair Athletic Assn., the governing body for U.S. wheelchair sports.

Still, wheelchair basketball officials felt handcuffed by Kiley’s situation.

Labanowich, who has called for revisions of the IPC’s drug testing program, said Kiley’s actions forced the group to suspend him shortly after he tested positive. When Kiley was asked before the test whether he ingested any substances, he failed to mention the Darvocet.

“That put us in a real bind in trying to defend David,” Labanowich said. “We couldn’t close our eyes to the wrongdoing.”

Kiley said he was asked if he had taken anything within 48 hours of the Sunday final. Counting days, not hours, he figured taking a pill on Friday night was outside the time frame. (He actually took it early Saturday.)

“I was thinking, ‘This is a hassle, I want to get back to the guys and celebrate,’ ” Kiley said. “So, I wasn’t as clear with the question as I should have been.”

But if Kiley made mistakes, so did the drug testers, according to some in the wheelchair basketball community.

They claim that the drug testing program violated Kiley’s confidentiality by openly discussing his result, and did not allow him to witness the analysis of his test, standard protocol in other international sports.

The community has supported Kiley’s efforts to have a fair appeal after becoming aware of the discrepancies. The Netherlands, Germany and France, the teams that finished second through fourth in Barcelona, last summer urged the IPC to give the United States due process. They want a resolution so the medals, now held in a safe-deposit box in the Sheffield bank, finally can be distributed.

Some officials are concerned that any standards short of those imposed by the International Olympic Committee would create a credibility problem for disabled athletes striving to be recognized as equals.

“We can’t fall into that naive trap,” Steadward said. “Years ago, people with disabilities used to be on all sorts of drugs for all sorts of reasons. We found as our sport grew more from a rehabilitation mentality to a sporting environment . . . there was less need to take a lot of drugs.”

Whereas Kiley and his supporters want a list of banned drugs that differs from the roster used by the able-bodied, they want the same standards of punishment and protocol.

During last summer’s World Cup soccer championships in the United States, Kiley watched with interest as the sport’s most famous player, Diego Maradona, was withdrawn by Argentina after testing positive for stimulants. Argentina was allowed to continue playing, however.

Maradona, who was once suspended for using cocaine, received a 15-month ban.

“My own country gave me a two-year suspension and gave my coach a four-year suspension,” Kiley said. “You can’t just take any guilt and hand down a punishment of the highest level of which there is no precedent in able-bodied or disabled (sport).”

That punishment has caused Kiley 2 1/2 years of pain, but until the medals are returned it will not end.

“The heaviest price is the nightmare of it all,” Kiley said.

The nightmare of awaking in pain.