Skating decision a slip-up for Rogge

LockerRoom/Tom Humphries: Poor old Jacques Rogge. In trying to be young and with it he seems to have aged 10 years in the short while he has been International Olympic Committee president. Just to prove he's not Juan Antonio Samaranch he's staying, during these Olympics, in the athletes' villages, hanging with the snowboard dudes and anyone else who just wants to "part-ay". And last Friday, like a father giving into the clamour from the back seat, he pulled in outside the ice-cream parlour and shook his head indulgently - Okay ki.

It sounded weak, implausible and badly thought out. The media, happy just to have had a scandal between its jaws, could scarcely believe it. What's the deal? Make enough noise and they change the results of an Olympic competition? We'll be trying this again. Samaranch would have kicked the matter of Canadian figure-skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier and their allegedly flawless performance downline to half a dozen or so arthritic committees who would have reported back to us sometime in 2007.

One wonders what US swimmer Shirley Babashoff makes of it all. Did she hear the news on Friday and feel at last she might be getting what is coming to her? After all if the IOC can in the space of four days, without concluding an investigation, change the result of one of its competitions and smudge the reputation of a French judge, surely at last they can find redress for the most cheated woman in Olympic history.

Perhaps Babashoff's problem was she didn't have the 100-watt smile. She didn't go on the chatshow circuit or get on stage and play air guitar with the band Barenaked Ladies as the Canadians did this week. Instead she said her piece and got christened "Surly Shirley" and was forgotten about until the last few years when people began to realise she should have been remembered as one of the greatest swimmers of all time.

Instead Babashoff's story is the parable which needs to be read to all who don't understand why drugs in sports matter, it's the refutation of the glib denial and the dumb "everyone is doing it so why shouldn't we?" argument which we Irish comforted ourselves through Olympian drug scandals. It's a sad story about the brutality of cheating, it's the reason why even if there is only one clean swimmer left in the world her rights are worth fighting for.

Babashoff retired from swimming at 19 with two Olympic gold and six silver medals in her drawer. She slammed the door shut and never opened it again. That she walked away branded a bad loser was sad enough but in her soul she felt she was a loser also. She closed the door on what had been the joy of her life. As a 15-year-old she had gone to Munich in 1972. It was a time when the world hadn't yet begun to wonder how East Germany produced female swim teams that looked and sounded like Welsh male choirs but Babashoff, the golden Californian, won gold and two silvers. Four years later, they said, and you'll be unbeatable Shirley.

By 1973 she was already beginning to doubt that. The East Germans showed up at World Championships in Belgrade looking like a different species. They won 10 out of the 14 golds on offer. Won them easily.

At Montreal Babashoff swam four individual freestyle events: 100, 200, 400 and 800 metres. Since Belgrade she had brought her training levels up and up in stubborn defiance of the laws of chemistry. She thought she could beat the little blue pills which the East Germans took for breakfast. Wrong. Kornelia Ender beat her in the 200 metres. Worse was the fact Petra Thumer beat her in the 400 and 800 metres. Thumer was a late replacement for the established star Barbara Krause. She was just plucked from the system, wound up and placed in the pool. Babashoff remarkably beat the old world records in both events but finished second in each. After the 400 metres she sealed her fate in PR terms by refusing to shake Thumer's hand. The world demanded sporting behaviour in the face of cheating.

If there was consolation, and for Babashoff there wasn't really, it came in the 400-metres freestyle relay, the final swimming event of the Montreal Olympics. When people talk fondly of great sporting upsets - and this week America's 1980 ice hockey victory over the Russians has been fondly reheated - they overlook possibly the greatest upset, the most heart-warming win of all time. The Americans qualified third for the final. You would have said they were lying in the long grass waiting for the East Germans except the world knew everyone else was competing for silver. Instead Babashoff anchored the team and led them to a remarkable victory.

It was an achievement which deserves to be remembered as a shining moment in Olympic history, instead it is brushed under the carpet with the detritus of the times. Four years ago the US swimming authorities led a campaign to have athletes' medals awarded to athletes who were beaten by proven cheats. The campaign got nowhere. The IOC refused all requests. Babashoff, who now delivers mail, was neither surprised nor interested. No committee could give her back the moments she deserved. She paid scant attention to the details of the East German doping trials, the guilty sentences passed on East German coaches who lied through their teeth at press conferences.

If the women who beat her transpired to be victims themselves, well, Babashoff still felt like a loser. No committee could wipe away all that hurt and just set a middle-aged postal worker off on cartwheels of joy. They could though provide some redress to history, they could send a message by altering Babashoff's few paragraphs of fame, by expunging the records of cheats, by deciding that anyone caught cheating subsequently in their career loses everything, by making Olympic athletes sign forms accepting that as a fact of life.

Jacques Rogge talks a good game when it comes to drugs in sport. Last week he performed badly, caving under the first squeeze of public pressure he has encountered in his presidency. Inadvertently he has opened the door to renewed requests to clean up the muddied record of the Olympic Games. Has he the courage or is he a man of straw who just made a big mistake?