Question Is, Should Drug-Tainted Records Stand?

The figurative dust was blown off record books for closer examination when Marion Jones decided to go after an obscure record, in the 300 meters, at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays today in Walnut.

Determining the record-holder is not as easy as it sounds because the event is run so seldom officially. Track & Field News editors and other experts recognize East German Marita Koch’s 34.1 seconds--a hand-held split time from her world record 400 (47.60), set in 1985 at Canberra, Australia.

However, that record, like so many involving East German athletes who later were reported to use doping methods with or without their knowledge, appeared to be called into question when Koch’s name came up at a scientific seminar Thursday night at Cornell Medical Center in New York.

German molecular biologist Werner Franke, who, with his wife and former Olympic track and field athlete Brigitte Berendonk, have documented years of systematic doping of athletes in the former German Democratic Republic, gave a presentation in which he showed slides and spoke about Koch’s drug program, among others, giving specific details of dosage and frequency.

Among those in the audience was Dr. Steven Ungerleider, whose recent book, “Faust’s Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine,” included a passage that says Koch wrote a letter in 1986 to an East German research director, Dr. Michael Oettel, complaining that “my drugs were not as potent as the ones that were given to my opponent Barbel Eckert, who kept beating me.”

Franke and his wife have obtained more than 10,000 pages of documents. Under a court order, he began by obtaining a set of military documents, detailing doping plans and athlete records. In 1994, he acquired Stasi (the East German secret police) files, which implicated the doctors who worked with the government on drug programs.

Yet, despite the revelations that have surfaced about East German drug use--including stories of cancer and other ailments and severe birth defects in children of doped athletes; fines and jail sentences resulting from legal action against coaches and administrators of the drug programs; and numerous athletes’ admissions--it is almost as though none of it ever happened when in comes to world records and medals.

East German athletes are still listed in the main resource, “The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics” by David Wallechinsky. Track and field medals have not been returned. Records still stand. A proposal at the 1999 International Amateur Athletic Federation Congress calling for a new set of world records at the millennium failed to pass.

Although the most overwhelming evidence surfaced in swimming, there have been no changes in that sport, either, despite a petition by attorney Richard Young on behalf of the U.S. Swimming Federation.

Young asked the International Olympic Committee to correct the record book for U.S. Olympians, who were victimized by the GDR doping program, losing medals to East Germans. Young, who is also a member of the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), did not get far with his argument even with the assistance of Franke’s documents and court testimony.

“There’s a genuine concern for what happened,” Young said last week in an interview. “It’s a tragedy for the clean athletes who were beaten and it’s an even bigger tragedy for the East German kids, the young kids who were doped without their knowledge.

“The question is what should you do about remedies? The sense I get is they [IOC officials] are extremely reluctant to reopen competitive results for any reason, be it boxing referee decisions or video replays. And that reluctance carries over to this situation.

“We’ve got the East Germans red-handed, either because kids have admitted it or coaches have been convicted for doping specific kids, and there are judicial findings that say Andrea Pollack was doped by her coach so-and-so on the following days in anticipation of the 1976 Olympic Games. It’s pretty definitive stuff. Then they [IOC officials] say, ‘If you look at the Nos. 4 and 5 girls, how do we know they weren’t doped?’ ”

There has not been a recent movement to come up with new world marks in track and field because of the possibility that some were set by doped athletes, said Craig Masback, chief executive officer of USA Track and Field. He is in favor of stripping proven steroid users of world records.

“In a circumstance that someone admits that they adulterated the competition by taking performance-enhancing drugs or in which there is overwhelming evidence to support that, retroactively changing the records and/or results is appropriate,” he said.

There is a precedent. Although Ben Johnson’s world record in the 100 meters in 1988 was erased when he tested positive after that race in Seoul, he also was stripped of the record he had set the year before in Rome because he confessed during a 1989 Canadian government inquiry that he had used steroids for several years.

Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon winner, received Stasi files from Franke, including doping information about the man who beat Shorter in 1976, East German Waldemar Cierpinski, a converted steeplechaser. “Cierpinski was No. 62, his code number in the [drug] program,” Shorter said.

He did not approach the IOC with his desire to have the ’76 results from Montreal overturned, waiting to see what would happen with the swimmers. He felt the swimmers had a more legitimate request because of sworn testimony in German trials.

Additionally, his focus changed after he began to work with then-White House drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey. Shorter is now the chairman of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

“I never really pursued it because I realized it wasn’t going to happen,” Shorter said. “And I wanted to do more than simply have the satisfaction of pointing out the hypocrisy. When I began to advise Gen. McCaffrey, that’s when the importance of whether or not this was done decreased.”

Ungerleider speaks of changes being made “in a perfect world.” Short of that, he and his colleagues hope for a differing philosophy in the IOC when a new president is elected in July to replace Juan Antonio Samaranch.

“Now it’s time for [the IOC] to say to the world--we need to put an asterisk or something in the history books . . . athletes like Shirley Babashoff, Frank Shorter, whoever, competed against so-and-so in the GDR that had a performance-enhancing drug in their system,” Ungerleider said. “It’s important they be acknowledged and recognized.”

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Staff Writer John Ortega contributed to this story.

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The Facts

* What: Mt. San Antonio College Relays.

* Where: Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut.

* When: Today’s events start at 9 a.m. with opening ceremonies for the international day of champions at 12:50 p.m.

* Who: Maurice Greene and Marion Jones, the world’s fastest man and woman, lead the entries in a meet that will include nine athletes who won medals in individual events in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.