WORLD SPORTS SCENE : Cuba’s Quirot Makes a Strong Comeback

It’s barely August, but unless Gen. George Patton materializes at a modern pentathlon competition somewhere, the comeback athlete of the year in Olympic sports is Cuba’s Ana Fidelia Quirot.

Thirty months after she almost died after suffering third-degree burns over 38% of her body in a kerosene fire in her kitchen, Quirot is again a world-class runner--perhaps the only threat to Mozambique’s Maria Mutola in track and field’s World Championships that begin Friday at Goteborg, Sweden.

Last week at Monte Carlo, Mutola won her 42nd consecutive 800-meter race, in 1 minute 57.40 seconds. Quirot, 32, was second in 1:57.69, a performance that she called her most meaningful even if it was more than three seconds slower than her all-time best.

After the fire, Cuban baseball players, who were traveling in the United States, spread the story that it started when Quirot tried to commit suicide because of a split with her unborn child’s father, high jumper Javier Sotomayor.

But while discussing the incident for the first time publicly in an interview last spring with Sports Illustrated, she said the fire was an accident, and while she and Sotomayor are not together, he supported her during her rehabilitation. They lost the baby.

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Decathlete Dan O’Brien, who competed in four events last weekend at the U.S. Olympic Festival, believes he is ready for a historic performance in Sweden. “If the weather’s decent and I feel good, then I think the 9,000 points could go down at this meet,” he said. He has the world record of 8,891. . . . The British press, which was aghast that the United States’ Butch Reynolds and Germany’s Katrin Krabbe took on the International Amateur Athletic Federation after testing positive for banned substances, is fully behind Great Britain’s Diane Modahl in her quarrel with the IAAF over a drug test. Modahl, an 800-meter runner, won her appeal to the British Athletics Federation, but the IAAF is not likely to back down in her case any more than it did with Reynolds and Krabbe, although it did send her case to arbitration on Monday. . . . Jonathan Edwards, who broke Willie Banks’ 10-year-old triple jump record this month, is the first Briton to hold a world record in a jump this century. . . . The IAAF has changed the schedule at Goteborg so that France’s Marie-Jose-Perec can compete in both the 400 meters and the 400-meter hurdles.

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Nicole Haislett moved from Florida this year to become a member of U.S. Swimming’s resident national team in an attempt to rekindle her competitive fire in time for this week’s national championships at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center. But she couldn’t do it, retiring at 22 last week.

“My personality doesn’t allow for mediocre results, but that’s the way I see things going,” said Haislett, who won three gold medals--more than any other U.S. Olympian--during the 1992 Olympic Games at Barcelona.

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In 1991, Haislett was the world champion in the 100-meter freestyle, ending 18 years of domination by East Germans in that event. Which brings us to Shirley Babashoff, who was nicknamed “Surly Shirley” by some among the U.S. media after she complained during the 1976 Olympics that the 11 gold medals in 13 events won by East German women swimmers were the product of steroids.

We know now, of course, Babashoff was right and the media wrong. Last week, she was nominated for induction into the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.

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Former world champion Kim Zmeskal was granted a waiver into the U.S. Gymnastics Championships Aug. 16-19 at New Orleans. Coming back after two years out of the sport, she was not ready for the last qualifying meet recently at Birmingham, Ala. . . . Jeanette Antolin, 13, of Huntington Beach, was second in the junior all-around competition at Birmingham. “The world championships after the ’96 Olympics is probably going to be her goal,” said her coach, Don Peters, of SCATS. . . . Two SCATS gymnasts, Tami Taylor of Huntington Beach and Amy Young of Diamond Bar, qualified for the national championships in the division for senior internationals.

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We hear often that figure skater Nancy Kerrigan’s behavior after the 1994 Winter Olympics cost her points with the public, but, according to The Sports Marketing Letter, she will earn $4 million in endorsements this year. That ties her for seventh place with San Francisco quarterback Steve Young among athlete endorsers. Another Olympian, Bonnie Blair, was 10th at $3.2 million. First was Michael Jordan at $35 million.