Swimming: Swimmers to press for gold despite rebuff

THE EFFORTS of four American Olympic swimmers to claim the gold medals won by an East German team that may have benefited from performance enhancing drugs will proceed, despite a rebuff by a leading International Olympic Committee official.

The US Olympic Committee will pursue the medals for the women's 400 metre medley relay team from the 1976 Montreal Games once it receives a written report from a German court case, according to the USOC president, Bill Hybl.

Hybl insisted the committee will not be deterred by comments made in Sydney, Australia, by Jacques Rogge, an IOC executive board member and a leading candidate to be the organisation's next president.

Rogge, the head of the IOC co-ordinating commission for the 2000 Games in Sydney, said the international committee was opposed to retroactive action on suspected drug users.

"There's absolutely not going to be any change for things that happened more than 10 years ago," Rogge said.

However, Hybl said he was prepared to ask the IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, for gold medals for Linda Jezek, Lauri Siering, Camile Wright and Shirley Babashoff. His plan is based on comments made in January, when Samaranch said the committee would consider stripping medals from former East German athletes identified as drug users.

Hybl said. "We will submit this, although we don't know what the outcome will be." He also said there were no plans to seek other medals and that no athletes, coaches or other representatives had approached the committee about a possible review since he announced his intention to request the swimming medals.

Jezek, Siering, Wright and Babashoff lost by 6.6 seconds to the East Germans in Montreal, but a German court case has provided what the USOC sees as firm proof that Pollack was helped by steroids.

The USOC will not ask the East Germans to relinquish their medals, because the doping appeared to be unknown to the competitors at the time.