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LAST UPDATED ON Friday October 31 2003 |
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C.J. Hunter's spin cycleSept 26 2000By STEPHEN BRUNT Globe and Mail Update Sydney ‹ Never has a press conference felt quite so clandestine. The call came to gather in a local hotel, though most got that message by word of mouth. The organizers were not the IOC or a national Olympic committee, not even a shoe company, but a public relations firm hired just Tuesday morning by the two most controversial figures in these - in many - Olympic Games. When C. J. Hunter and his wife, Marion Jones, finally walked to the dais holding hands, to the flutter of a hundred shutters, it felt like something from the Year of OJ. And with Johnnie Cochrane lurking somewhere in Los Angeles, pulling the strings, that surely wasn't entirely coincidental. v The rules were firm: they'd talk, and we'd listen. Jones would make a statement - her last before the end of the Sydney Games, she said - then disappear to continue preparing for her quest to win five gold medals. "I am here to show my complete support for my husband," she said. "I have total and complete respect and belief that the legal system will do whatever is necessary to clear his name." She asked reporters to stop calling her apartment at all hours of the day and night. Then she gave Hunter a kiss and exited, stage right, leaving the massive man all by himself. It is fair to say he had some explaining to do. On Monday, it was revealed that the shot putter had tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone at a meet in Norway in July. That result wasn't made public at the time he later took himself off the United States Olympic team, allegedly because of a knee injury which required surgery. On Tuesday, the story was embellished slightly. It turned out that Hunter had actually tested positive four times during the summer track season. And yet without a leak, that information wouldn't have been public here, where Jones is a marquee attraction - an attraction who just might be tainted by the fact that she enjoyed both a personal and professional relationship (Hunter is also her coach) with an alleged doper. Canadians, as veterans of the dope wars, understand that this is the point where the spin begins. The credo espoused by Ben Johnson and his fellow users 12 years ago - Deny, Deny, Deny - hasn't changed much in the interim, except that now it's also standard practice to attack any positive test through the courts. Remember Cochrane and those bloods spots, remember the DNA. We are headed into the world of the glove-that-wouldn't-fit. Hunter though, before turning to legality and popular science, offered an emotional opening salvo. Known to be a surly, silent man, especially with the press, this time he had plenty to say, and occasionally he broke down in tears. "I might be downright mean at times," he said. "But nobody on this planet can say that I don't love my wife, and that I don't love my kids. I would never in my life do anything to hurt them.... There is nothing anyone can do to get me to bring shame on the people I love." Therefore, he argued, he would never have used a performance enhancing substance - those others who do apparently being heartless folks, unconcerned about hurting family and friends. And besides, Hunter continued, "track and field has never been that important for me. Never to the point where I would do something like this... "I had no desire or intent to even compete past this year. This is it for me. The reason I throw now is so I can travel around the world with my wife for free." In the end, "there's nothing I need. There's nothing I want. And there's nothing I would gain," he argued. Therefore why would he possibly take the risk? "I've been through too much shit in my life, too much to take any kind of chance doing something like this." Again - as if that weren't the case with every other athlete who has rolled this particular pair of dice. So why the four positives? "I don't know what has happened. But I can promise everyone that I'm going to find out, and you're going to know." For the record, Hunter did trot out a nutritionist ("I'm not a doctor") with a little, pencil moustache, and via telephone a former associate professor of pharmacology, to state unequivocally that he couldn't possibly have been using nandrolone. All an innocent mistake, apparently, because he took a simple dietary supplement. And perhaps that's true. Perhaps the world has rushed to judgment. Perhaps hundreds of athletes who took that same simple dietary supplement will start testing positive for nandrolone any second now. To be a Canadian in these circumstances, though, is to be a touch more cynical. Most of us don't think OJ's going to find the true killer, either. 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