Tuesday, September 26, 2000
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Drug fight spurs on Russian star

How do you solve a problem like Maria Kisseleva, suspended Russian queen of aquatic ballet? You sue the pharmaceutical company that made a meal out of a banned substance, lobby for leniency and then progress from being stripped of a European title in July to serving a one-month ban in August before becoming Olympic champion in September.

Kisseleva tackled the weighty question of her drugs ban with the dexterity she had shown in the water alongside her duet partner Olga Brusnikina as the pair became the first Russians to win an Olympic medal of any hue, let alone the gold, in synchronised swimming.

“It was a great shock, a real tragedy,” she said of the moment she was told that ephedrine had been found in the urine sample she produced for drugs testers in Helsinki in July. Drugs among the nose-clip loving ladies of the lake? Unthinkable.

"A food supplement was recommended to me by the National Olympic Committee and the pharamaceutical company because they said it would help me to control my weight,” said Kisseleva, not a hint of fat about her. “They did not tell me that it contained a banned substance. We just could not believe it when I was told about the drugs test. We are now going through the courts against this company.”

The gold medal, gained with nine out of ten perfect scores, had made up for the loss of the European title, said a tearful Kisseleva, who turns 26 on Thursday. On their journey, she and Brusnikina had suffered more than their fair share of sacrifice: ten hours of training a day, only one day a month at home in Moscow for the past two years, no boyfriends, no parties - all to perfect a performance that was clearly a class apart in Sydney.

Russia played the Japanese at their own drumbeat. In suits that mimicked the attire of a martial artist, the black belts of water ballet thrust life and limbs into a frenetic interpretation of karate to the tune of Kodo drums. The theme had not been planned as a deliberate tactic to upset their closest rivals, the Russians said, but it breathed aggression when set beside the friendship theme of “Mate” to which Miya Tachibana and Miho Takeda swam for the silver medal.

The French were third in a competition that included three sets of twins and a pair of sisters. Relatively speaking, the sisters were the most successful, Erika and Lillian Leal, of Mexico, finishing ninth. Carolina and Isabela Moraes, of Brazil, were twelfth, while Livia and Lucia Allarova, of Slovakia, and Heba and Sara Abdel Gawad, of Egypt, did not make it past the preliminary round.

But what of Canada, a nation that had never before failed to make the medal rostrum? Their fifth place might have sent them mad but for the fact they had already played the lunatics of the pool in a surreal routine entitled “Madness”. Some looked on bemused while others fell about in hysterical laughter as Claire Carver-Dias and Fanny Letourneau tackled the dark side of the pool.

Carver-Dias explained their “journey through the mind of someone mad”: “We start with more a dark serious side and then there’s the section where there’s voices and we have a little bit of fear in our eyes and a bit of confusion and then it goes into the complete 'I’ve lost it but I’m enjoying myself sort of craziness’.” Her eyes rolled and people backed away nervously, just as the judges had done.

Kisseleva’s suspension ended just two weeks before the Games. Had the customary ban of three months been imposed, she would not have been in Sydney. Her case for clemency was helped by the personal intervention of Cornel Marculescu, the director of Fina, who decided that Kisseleva was genuinely ignorant about the ingredients of the weight-loss “pills” that were given to her as a food supplement. The substance would not have enhanced her performance, he believed.

No such support for Andreea Raducan, the Romanian gymnast who had been given a cold remedy in Sydney before she won the gold medal in the all-round competition last week. Today, she was stripped of her title for testing positive for a variety of the same substance that caught Kisseleva out - pseudoephedrine. Who said sport was fair?

Craig Lord
The Times