America Wins Olympics

October 2, 2000

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It was an Olympics game marked by drug scandals and monumental blunders by officials. The games could not be seen live in the United States because NBC, which held the monopoly on U.S. Olympics broadcasts, wanted to reserve all of the big events for prime time, requiring tape delay. But for Americans, it was another golden Olympiad, as the U.S. team won its thirteenth Olympic games. In the total medal count, the U.S. outscored second place Russia by 11 medals, winning 97 medals total to Russia's 88. In gold medals, the victory was 39 for America and 32 for Russia. China finished a distant third with 59 total medals, 28 of them gold.

American Marion Jones was the standout performer in track and field becoming the fastest woman on earth by winning the gold in the 100-meter sprint. Jones also won the 200-meter spring, picked up a gold and a bronze in relays, and won a bronze in the long jump, becoming the first woman to win five track and field medals at one Olympics.

American Maurice Greene became the fastest man on earth by winning the men's 100-meter sprint, while Michael Johnson repeated his Olympic triumph from 1996 by winning the 400 meters.

The United States dominated the pool with standout performances by Jenny Thompson, who now has won more Olympic gold medals (eight) than all but one woman (Russian gymnast Larysa Latynina, who has nine). Her 10 total medals tie her with Carl Lewis for second place all time on the U.S. medal list.

The U.S. teams also won both the men's and women's basketball titles as well as the baseball and softball competitions, bringing home for the first time the titles in all of the traditional American team sports. The U.S. women won a silver in soccer, but America was shut out in the gymnastics competition as America's team failed to repeat its 1996 triumph.

Almost derailing Jones' drive for five track and field medals was the one of many Olympic drug scandals. The Sydney Daily Telegraph first broke the story that Jones' husband, shot putter C.J. Hunter, had tested positive for drugs in July. He had withdrawn from the U.S. Olympic team a week before the Games, supposedly because a knee injury forced him to have surgery. However, with the drug story, it became clear that that USA Track and Field had hushed up a potentially major drug scandal. Hunter's reported drug use had nothing to do with Jones, of course, but it could have affected her concentration on her own competition. Her husband's alleged cheating is ironic in view of Jones earlier statement regarding drug use by athletes, "All I can do is continue to be clean and to be around people who are clean."

The Hunter scandal was one of several instances of positive drug tests in the news at the Sydney Olympics. Women's gymnastics all-around champion Andrea Raducan of Romania was stripped of her gold for testing positive for cold medicine, and the Bulgarian weightlifting team had three medals stripped for steroid abuse.

Women continued to make strides with new events added to the Olympic program. America's Stacy Dragila won the first-ever women's pole vault. Out of the 11,084 athletes taking part in Sydney, 38.3 percent were women, versus 34 percent at the 1996 Atlanta Games. Women also made up for 44 percent of the total number of events at the 2000 Games.

The U.S. dominated the swimming events in the 2000 Olympics, burying the challengers from Australia under a pile of gold, silver and bronze. The U.S. team won 33 medals, including 14 golds, to surpass the 13-gold, 26-medal haul from Atlanta. In fact, it was the most gold medals in a non-boycotted Olympics since 1972 and equaled the most overall medals since countries were limited to only two entrants per event in 1984. Notable among America's swimmers were Lenny Krayzelburg, the Ukrainian emigrant who backstroked to three golds, Jenny Thompson, finishing her career with a record eight gold medals, and 33-year-old Dara Torres, winning five medals after a seven-year layoff.

Krayzelburg achieved an Olympic double by winning both the 100-meter and 200-meter backstroke events. Krayzelburg was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Due to growing anti-Semitism in what was then the Soviet Union, he immigrated with his family to America in 1989, settling in the Los Angeles area. Since his high school didn’t have a swim team and his family couldn’t afford a car, he rode a bus to Santa Monica to swim at the Westside Jewish Community Center. While a student at Santa Monica Junior College, Krayzelburg worked 30 hours a week to help support himself. Despite his exhausting schedule, he broke the national junior college record in the 200-yard backstroke and his coach asked Mark Schubert, the USC swim coach, to coach Krayzelburg. Once he began training with Schubert, Krayzelburg rose to prominence, just missing a spot on the 1996 Olympic team.

Thompson has been near the top longer than almost any other Olympic athlete in history. Her three gold medals in Sydney have put her past speed skater Bonnie Blair for the most gold medals by any U.S. woman. Thompson, 27, has been a national-class swimmer since 1987, when she was 14. She almost made the 1988 Olympic team at 15. She broke a world record in '92 (in the 100-meter freestyle) and another in '99 (in the 100 butterfly). That seven-year gap between world records is unprecedented in swimming.

Torres retired from swimming after the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. She competed at the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Olympic Games, earning four medals (two gold, one silver and one bronze). She has not competed since the 1992 Olympic Games. Since leaving the sport in 1992, Torres has been busy with a career in television, including a stint as the host of "Extreme Step," a segment of the Discovery Channel's science and technology show, "The Next Step." Her reports on sports technology found her scuba-diving with sharks, skiing uphill, climbing up frozen waterfalls, windsurfing, hang-gliding, sky-surfing and more.

Prior to her Olympic comeback, Torres was better known by many as a spokesperson for the Tae-bo workout videotapes. However, prior to the 2000 Olympics, she was one of just 10 American swimmers who had competed in three Olympics. Now she is the only American and one of only nine swimmers in the world to have competed in four Olympiads. Her two gold medals in Sydney make her the oldest woman swimmer to win gold.

The swimmers' success came as a surprise to many people who had predicted an American flop in the swimming events. Even Mark Spitz, winner of seven gold medals in 1972, worried that the U.S. women wouldn't win any; they wound up with seven. "We have a lot of history, a lot of heart," Thompson said. "That's a spirit Mark should have known about. He's been a part of that spirit."

Olympic diving was a different story. In a sport once dominated by America, the U.S. managed to win only one medal in Sydney. Between 1920-76, the U.S. won 40 gold medals out of a possible 54. But since 1984, the U.S. team has managed only six golds out of 24 events, four of them by Greg Louganis. The Chinese divers dominated the 2000 Olympics, becoming the first country to win five diving medals at a single Olympics. The Chinese also captured five silvers. Excluding the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which was boycotted by the U.S., Americans brought home the fewest diving medals since 1912.

The only U.S. diving medal was won by Laura Wilkinson, an 18-year-old with a deep faith in God who stunned a star-studded field to claim America’s first gold in the women's Olympic platform event since Lesley Bush in 1964. Wilkinson, of Houston, Texas, turned in the performance of her career, scoring four 9.5's in the crucial third round. Before each of her five dives, the former gymnast recited Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me." Wilkinson was so at ease with the occasion that she blew a kiss to her supporters a few moments before her fourth dive. "I just prayed to God and he heard," said Wilkinson. "I didn't want to hold back. It was so exciting."

Wilkinson was in disbelief when she saw that she had won the gold and fell into the arms of coach Ken Armstrong. "That was our best result in Olympic women's platform diving since '64," Armstrong said afterwards. "I knew she had it in her. Her third dive helped her out big time, and her fourth dive, if she didn't hit it, she was gone. But she kept her nerve up and she got a lot of help from God."

In a gymnastics competition beset with official blunders and accusations of illegal drug use, the U.S. women's Olympic team was shut of the medal competition for the first time since 1988. The shut out was due to two factors. First, the coach of the U.S. national team, Bela Karolyi, used a controversial selection technique for the team in which he ignored the results of the Olympic trials and picked his personal favorites for the team. Karolyi hoped that this would help the U.S. repeat as the Olympic gold medallists in the team competition. However, Karolyi's gamble meant that when the team ended up in fourth place, the U.S. was left with only one strong contender for an individual medal, Elise Ray. Ray's chances of winning an individual medal were eliminated when a monumental blunder by the Australian organizers of the Olympic competition resulted in the vault being set at the wrong height for the all-around competition. The all-around serves as the qualifier for the other individual events. As a result of the wrong height setting, Ray suffered a devastating fall in her first event, eliminating her from competition for the all-around medal and destroying her confidence in the remaining events.

Romania won the team gold medal while Russia and China won the silver and bronze. The team competition, although designated as a team event, is not really a team competition in practice. The six gymnasts on a team do not do a six-person pyramid on the balance beam but rather compete individually in each event. The combined scores then determine the team score. The preliminary part of the team competition also serves as the qualifying event for the all-around and for the competition for the individual apparatus.

In the all-around competition, Andrea Raducan led a Romanian sweep. The silver medal went to Simona Amanar and the bronze medal to Maria Olaru. However, Raducan's two strongest competitors, Elise Ray of the U.S. and Svetlana Khorkina of Russia, were eliminated by the vault blunder. In an almost comical turn of events, Raducan was promptly stripped of her medal for using a banned cold medicine. The medal was then awarded to Amanar, who refused to accept it. Amanar used the same cold medicine as Raducan, prescribed by the Romanian team's doctor, but the drug was not detected in the drug test following the event, so Raducan was not stripped of the (refused) medal.

Gymnastics' international governing body finally took responsibility for the blunder in which the vault was set at the wrong height in competition. Australian officials supervised by international officials from the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG) were responsible for ensuring the equipment was correctly aligned. The equipment was not checked in the change over between the men's and women's competition. The vault in the men's competition is set 2 inches lower than for the women. The Australian officials failed to adjust the height when setting up the equipment for the women. Journalists said they could not recall such a monumental blunder at a major championship, which severely affected the taller gymnasts such as Ray and Khorkina. The shorter gymnasts such as Raducan seemed unaffected by the lower vault. The incorrect height setting was not discovered until 18 of the 36 gymnasts had competed on the vault.

FIG issued a statement acknowledging its technical committee should have detected the mistake. It said officials had been reprimanded following the mistake, in which the vault was set two inches too low, and steps had been taken to ensure it didn't occur again. However, it made no mention of what effect the mistake may have had on the outcome of the competition. "The Federation Internationale de Gymnastique regrets very much the error of the vault height setting which occurred during the competition," the statement said. "It is very unfortunate that this situation occurred during the Olympic Games and FIG regrets the duress that the situation placed on some gymnasts."

The gymnasts were given the chance to throw out their first scores and try again, but out of the 18, just five chose to do so. Khorkina stumbled on her first vault and scored only 9.035 on what is normally one of her strongest apparatus. She adjusted for a 9.662 score on her second vault for a combined score of 9.343 which put her medal hopes under threat. She later fell from the uneven bars. Ray faired even worse, scoring a 7.6 on the vault and later falling from the balance beam. Five gymnasts, including Ray, decided to take up the second opportunity but Khorkina declined because she was too far from medal contention. Ray scored a respectable 9.443 in the re-do, but with the fall on the balance beam ranked only 14th in the all-around competition.

Raducan was stripped the all-around gold medal today after the International Olympic Committee medical commission ruled that she took a cold tablet containing a banned stimulant. IOC vice-president Kevan Gosper, Australia's top Olympic official, said the IOC executive board's decision came after much debate. She will keep another gold and silver medal because she tested negative after those events. "The rule is very definitive," Gosper said. "We had a long discussion and it wasn't easy and I'm pleased that the athlete can continue to compete. It was not a compromise solution, it was completely in line with the text of the medical code." Gosper said there had been differences of opinion about the case, which he described as "most unusual ... I don't know of any case like this before ... The decisions aren't always easy, even as firm as the rules are, but we have to be consistent." Gosper is an odd person to making judgements on others, as he has had his own ethics problems. An IOC member since 1977, he was a founding member of the IOC's ethics commission but was forced to resign after he came under investigation in the bribery scandal surrounding the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. He was also forced to apologize to Australians for using his connections to make his daughter the first Australian torchbearer of the Olympic flame.

Olympic medical commission chairman Alexandre de Merode of Belgium said the Romanian team doctor who gave Raducan the banned cold tablets would be expelled from the Sydney Games and banned from the Salt Lake City Winter Games and Athens in 2004. "Unfortunately the product was inside her body. In place of excluding her from the Games we have said we will withdraw the medal. The team (gold medal) she wins, she loses the individual (gold medal) and she conserves the second (silver) individual."

Romanian Olympic Committee president Ioan Tiriac blamed cold and flu tablets for the positive test. "She has a cold," he said. "We are talking about two cold pills bought over the counter which were declared to the medical commission beforehand." Tiriac said up to eight other Romanian gymnasts had taken cold tablets containing the banned stimulant pseudoephedrine. He said Raducan's slight frame -- she's 4'10" tall and weighs 81 lbs. -- could have triggered the positive result.

"We took neurophen, a medicine you buy over the counter for a cold," he said. He said the "banned stimulant," pseudoephedrine, was not on the International Gymnastics Federation list of banned substances, but was illegal under Olympic rules. "Our luck and honesty was that the (team) doctor has filled out (forms) completely with all the medicine the athletes took in the last four or five days before the test," he said. "(Taking) this medicine is not only her but probably five, six, seven, eight athletes in the team who have a cold."

Raducan's dark eyes and tiny frame have earned her comparisons to Nadia Comaneci, who at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10. The 16-year-old Raducan won a silver medal in the vault in addition to the two gold medals she won in the all-around and the team competition. She was the first Romanian to win the all-around title since Comaneci in 1976.

Raducan passed a drug test after winning the individual all-around competition. She also won a gold in the team event. After winning the silver medal in the vault, she submitted to a second test, which she reportedly failed. For unexplained reasons, the IOC stripped Raducan of the individual gold (for which she passed the drug test) and allowed her to keep the silver (for which she failed the drug test).

Meanwhile, Svetlana Khorkina, the Russian who was cheated of a chance at the all-around gold by the misplaced vault, won the gold on the uneven bars. Khorkina also won the gold in 1996, so she is now a dual Olympic champion.

Khorkina's fall from the uneven bars in the all-around cost her a possible medal. When she landed in the individual competition, she showed little emotion, even after her score of 9.862 was posted. Only after the two remaining gymnasts -- teammate Elena Prodounova and China's Jie Ling -- had competed and she knew that she had won did she begin to cry. She ran back on to the podium and kissed the bars, gazed skyward and mumbled a few words as if to say thank you. Khorkina, 21, received the highest scores of the entire artistic gymnastics competition, a 9.95 and 9.90 from the Khazikstan and Hungarian judges. Only the Canadian judge scored Jie Ling higher than her.

It's odd that for using an over-the-counter cold medication that did not enhance performance, the Romanian gymnast Raducan was stripped of her gold medal and the team doctor banned from Olympic competition. For setting the vault at the wrong height, not checking it, ruining the Olympic hopes of 18 gymnasts, and throwing the results of the entire competition into question, the IOC and Gymnastics Federation says "I'm sorry" and that's the end of it. Perhaps the wrong people have been stripped and banned.

Olympic Medal Lists:

• National Rankings in the 2000 Olympics
• American Medals in the 2000 Olympics

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