Time the sponsors began to bulk up

There was an aching poignancy attached to the news which broke on Friday about Petra Kind-Schneider. Petra is the East German woman whose 400 metres individual medley world record was the last created under that foul regime to fall. For 15 years she sat at the top of the record books.

Petra Kind-Schneider lost her record finally and fittingly during the Chinese national games last October when Chen Yan ducked comfortably under the landmark. The baton had been passed with perfect symbolism.

Petra Kind-Schneider is unlikely to have been interested in all that pathos and irony. This week, while we learned so much more about how Chinese women get those incredible muscles, we learned also that Kind-Schneider is suffering seriously from both heart and liver disease, a woman with an empty past and a desolate future.

So add another victim to the list of women with scrambled, cancer-ridden insides and hollow, cheated memories. Add another life to the list of those warped and destroyed by drugs in sport.

It is hard to comprehend the vast, frozen emptiness which the drug-stained history of women's swimming has created. In 1992, Sports Illustrated brought together two of the most luminous victims of the East German era: Kornelia Ender was one of the greatest swimmers of all time; Shirley Babashoff was one of the sorest losers of all time, the woman from whom Ender had stolen the chance of greatness.

Babashoff should have had five Olympic gold medals to show her children. Instead, she got four silvers and the dazzlingly clever moniker "Surly Shirley" because she dared voice her suspicions about what precisely was fuelling Ender.

Swimming people aren't stupid, unless they wear blazers and get plenty of free trips, in which case they can be wilfully stupid.

Swimming is unique. There is no sport, no other form of human locomotion which has been so minutely examined by scientists, physiologists and coaches. Swimming people know, really know, about what the musculature of somebody who swims 100 kilometres a week is, they know the age at which improvement is normal and why it is so, they know the parameters for the rate of honest improvement, they know the events in which cheating is most easily accomplished.

Babashoff wasn't stupid. She knew the mechanics. She looked at Kornelia Ender and cried foul and thus became the sorest, ugliest American of her era.

At least, though, she knew the inner fulfilment of honest effort, at least she had genuinely pushed the envelope of her potential. Kornelia Ender will never know.

When Sports Illustrated came along more than a decade-and-a-half after Montreal to bring Babashoff and Ender together, the scars had almost healed for Babashoff.

And Ender? She cut a sad, poignant figure, a woman whose entire personal history had been built on a lie. Everything which defined her was bogus. Her life had been sacrificed for personal glory and political prestige. Now there was nothing left of either.

When she was 11 years old, she was taken from home to a training centre in Bitterfeld. At 13, she won three silver medals in the Munich Olympics. Over the next four years she set 23 world records. She was the swimmer who defined an era.

When she spoke of that period she could say nothing for certain, her words carried the nature of the internal struggle. She needs to believe the unbelievable.

"After every workout I got a cocktail with vitamins. I drank it because I wanted to recover as fast as I could."

She could not remember if her urine was tested by the East German authorities before big meets, but she remembers team-mate Barbara Krause being abruptly withdrawn from the Montreal games without explanation. Another thought struck her.

"My father went to Dr Kipke and said: `If you give anything like that (steroids) to my daughter, I'm taking her out of the programme.' The doctor said, `Then you'd better take her out.' But he didn't. My father must have known."

The struggle for self-justification is painful, with a cruel need to believe her past isn't counterfeit and phoney.

"Only the golds," she said, "stay bright. Why should I even think about these golds now being tainted? Why, when I didn't know anything then or now? Why should I give a thought to what might have been given to me 16 years ago, when I was a child you see in the pictures?"

So it goes. Why should she give a thought? How can she do anything else?

This week, we face into a swimming world championships in Perth which threatens to degenerate into one of the saddest sporting farces of all time.

Is there a solution? Well, it starts with money and with sponsors and TV, with the very people who made the carrot big enough to stir the cheating donkeys. It starts with the very people who apply a shiny gloss to everything.

We got an electronic note from Donncha Redmond late last week. Donncha is one of our top swimmers and he knows a thing or two about his sport and the half-hearted battle it has waged against drugs. He contacted this column with a suggestion that carries more hope than any other.

Why not a sponsor for drug testing? If Coca Cola and other organisations are prepared to fork out $40 million a time to sponsor the Olympics, why aren't they ensuring that what they attach their name to is clean and healthy and wholesome? Forget athlete's muscles, what about sponsor's muscle? When a Chinese competitor is apprehended at an airport carrying enough human growth hormone to fuel an entire team without the risk of ever testing positive, nobody but the wilfully stupid can think that we are seeing anything other than a desecration and mockery of sport unfolding on the pooldeck.

How do the sponsors feel about this? How does TV feel shelling out big money for something as inherently sick as this? How do they feel about all the years when they gushed mindlessly about Petra Schneider and Kornelia Ender and hustled "Surly" Shirley Babashoff into the margins? Do they want their money back, or do they engage in a quiet complicity? Donncha Redmond recognises that if swimming - and some other sports - are to be regenerated, then the clock must be turned back to year zero, that there must be some lean years where the big stars are missing, where the times are slower but more honest, when all that is being sold by TV and sponsors is good, clean sport. Sponsors must spend money to be identified with something as seriously unsexy as urine in bottles and blood in vials, they must spend more money to fund the research necessary to keep testing ahead of cheating.

There are 101 safe ways to cheat at swimming. Just one way to stop it all. Donncha Redmond might just have hit on it. But, Donncha, don't hold your breath waiting for the IASA to offer you the life membership.