Dope and glory

Nowadays, most fans would struggle to tell the difference between Maurice Greene and Tim Montgomery. Sometime between Ben Johnson getting caught cheating at the Seoul Games in 1988 and Linford Christie’s questionable reign as world’s fastest man, the popularity of these events appeared to seriously decline. Hardly a coincidence either.
Every so often during the coverage of the current scandal involving Marion Jones, BALCO laboratories, and just about every other serious male and female sprinter of this generation, some journalist somewhere will draw an analogy with Michelle Smith and bring us back to the shameful summer of 1996. It’s good that they do because apart from the shoplifting escapades of her husband Erik de Bruin, you don’t hear so much about Smith these days.
We gather that she is on her way to becoming a barrister. Fair play to her. An ironic choice of vocation given that her name has become an international byword for cheating in sport. The easiest way for reporters writing articles about drug use and all that glitters not being gold is to simply cite the Smith example. A convenient parable to illustrate the essential fraud that is doping, it forces us to remember that shameful episode in our own recent history. And how else are we to learn from it if we don’t confront it?
Personally, I always felt that the Smith debacle divided the nation even more bitterly than did the Roy Keane-Mick McCarthy schmozzle in 2002. During and after the Saipan affair, it was possible to side with one character or the other in that row without being accused of un-Irish activities. To question
Rathcoole’s golden girl (pass the sickbag please) was, and in some lunatic quarters may still be considered, tantamount to treason.
It wasn’t treason then. It isn’t treason now. It is merely the application of logic and reason. When a mediocre athlete meanders along for most of her career before suddenly metamorphosing into a world-beater, questions need to be asked. Even more so when the person’s rebirth coincides with the appointment of a convicted dope user as her trainer. Smith’s emergence in the mid-1990s stank from start to finish and the failure of many people to accept this was an indicator of our immaturity as a nation. Most of her supporters felt that she couldn’t possibly be a drug cheat because, well, because she was Irish.
This week, Smith’s shadow will loom large over the Canadian national swimming trials at the Etobicoke Olympian pool. There, a woman named Joanne Malar will be attempting to make history by becoming the first Canadian to qualify for four Olympics. Now 28 years old, she made her debut way back in Barcelona. Hotly tipped for glory in Atlanta, she disappointed an eager nation when she failed to medal. The closest she came was a fourth in the 200-meter individual medley, a race won by Smith.
“I got labeled a disappointment and ‘Joanne Malar chokes’ and, at 20, that’s very, very difficult to read about yourself,” Malar said. “Most people don’t get bad press unless they’re criminals or have stolen money from the company you’ve worked for. Here, you have an amateur athlete working her heart out every day, who finished fourth in the world against cheaters and she’s labeled a big disappointment. That really made me the person I am today. I see myself for who I am and what I do for me, instead of a lot of people who make their opinions about themselves by what other people think or say.”
In truth, Malar is a longshot to even make the trip to Athens. She already looked past her best when she failed to medal in Sydney four years ago. Her pursuit of another Olympic blazer has more to do with a personal crusade rather than a genuine shot at a title, and she can afford to indulge herself. A popular motivational speaker, sometime television presenter and spokesperson for a health and wellness company, Malar has become everything in Canada that Smith might have been in Ireland if she wasn’t caught trying to pull a fast one.
Malar was one of the lucky ones, though. She was strong enough to be able to cope with the frustration of losing out to a chemically-enhanced competitor. Others were less fortunate. Allison Wagner was 18 when Smith surprisingly steamed past her in the last quarter of the 400-meter individual medley final in Atlanta. Having trained for seven hours a day for 10 years, she retired from the sport shortly after, utterly disillusioned. Apart from finishing second to Smith, she also won two World Championship silver medals behind two Chinese swimmers who subsequently tested positive. Little wonder the woman ended up battling bulimia and anorexia nervosa.
“Thirty years from now, she will show her grandchildren her gold medal,” Wagner said in an interview with the Irish Times a couple of years back. “I will show my grandchildren silver. She has those gold medals in her possession. She will always have gold and I will always have silver. It will always be that way forever. East Germans admitted that they cheated and the governing bodies cannot even take the medals away from them.”
All those apologists for Smith who will argue that she never tested positive, that the test where she was found guilty of tampering with a urine sample came long after the Atlanta Olympics, and that the whiskey was poured into the sample by mischievous mad scientists in some laboratory in Spain should remember that quote. Where once the East Germans set the historic standard for sports cheating, there now stands Michelle Smith.
Her achievements remain in the Olympic record book, of course. An insult to the notion of what sports is supposed to be about. A reminder of Irish sport’s darkest days.