Grant Shimmin
You’ve got to feel sorry for the Aussies. (Well, you might if they weren’t the people who kept thumping us at every sport under the sun.)
Here they are, organising the Olympics in a host city that has every natural advantage going, and things just keep going wrong. You don’t have to look at the sports pages in Australia to know the Olympics are coming – it’s all over the news pages.
There he was, Michael Knight, cari-catured on the front of the Sydney Morning Herald. No, not David Hasselhoff in his Knight Rider get-up, the Olympic minister. I won’t bore you with the details, but he was about to get dragged into court, and not for the first time since the city won the right to host the games.
Headaches affecting the organisers have included that event tickets, which will allow holders free transport on trains and buses for the whole of the day of the event in question, were found to be too big to fit into the turnstiles at railway stations.
Then, a week ago, a new problem emerged. A man used to throwing a round object made of wood and metal from the confines of a wire mesh cage revealed he’d tried his hand at writing, to devastating effect.
I have to confess that the name Werner Reiterer was not one that caused an instant spark of recognition, despite his 1994 Commonwealth Games gold medal. I won’t forget him in a hurry now, however.
Reiterer, according to the blurb on his book Positive, co-written with former Melbourne athlete Craig Spencer, was in with a shot at discus gold in Sydney – his home Olympics, since his family had migrated from Austria when he was a young boy.
But he walked away from it all earlier this year, unable to bring himself to shoot for the medal in the knowledge that he would have been just another medal- winning athlete pumped full of drugs, many still undetectable by tests, after deciding to go the doping route in 1995.
“My decision not to go [to Sydney] was determined by the simple fact that I believe I have a responsibility to tell the truth … Doubtless, it will hurt people, cause me heartache, cost me friends, and will tarnish my name. But I can
cope with that more easily than spending the rest of my life living a lie,” he says.
Reiterer didn’t help his case by refusing to name names after Aussie Olympic chief John Coates had ordered an immediate inquiry. Many have written him off as an opportunist, simply trying to sell books, but the thing that will strike anyone who reads Positive is the amount of detail it contains about the scourge of doping, its extent and how easily it is covered up. If a tenth of what Reiterer has put on paper is true, the sports affected are in big trouble and many of the major events at this year’s Olympics will be a sham. At the very least, his assertions bear completely independent investigation before he is shot down in flames.
ENDS