Russian skier Larissa Lazutina wants to retrieve Olympic gold through the courts

Yesterday evening, we discovered that Russian skier Larissa Lazutina appealed to the Supreme Sports Arbitration Court in Lausanne. She is protesting against the fact that she was stripped of her gold medal at the Salt Lake Olympics.

The appeal was sent right after yesterday’s session of the Federation Council with the participation of Leonid Tyagachev, the head of Russia’s National Olympic Committee. The Russian news program Vesti informed that the usage of drugs by the Russian skier has been earlier considered by the Council’s Committee for sport and youth affairs.

In the words of Lazutina herself, no banned medicines were used at all. Her attorneys are naive, as they suppose “there is a chance for success in court," and the skier will retrieve her gold.

The doctors say that, probably, “special regenerating medicines that were used with juice” are meant here. Leonid Tyagachev considers the problem to be very complicated. He is not familiar with such medicine, which is why it is hard for him to say for sure whether it was doping or a regenerating medicine.

It is evident that the doctors demonstrated their ignorance of the situation: the problem is that regenerative medicines “have an effect only in 2.5 to 3 weeks after administation”.

In the article “What a shame!”about the scandal with two Russian skiers on the very last day of the Salt Lake Olympics, PRAVDA.Ru already mentioned the opinion of Vladimir Soloviev, a spokesman for Russian company Bosco sport. He said that it was an open secret that all athletes take chemicals, but not all chemicals are allowed. It is astonishing why doctors from the Russian delegation were ignorant of the fact that some medicines are banned and some are allowed.

At the same time, this seems to be only one aspect of the problem. There are some objective reasons for the incident with the Russian skiers (and other athletes as well) at the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.

It is true that Russia is lagging behind the leading sports powers in the sphere of “pharmacology." The problem has not been touched upon by scientists after the breakup of the USSR. We have no anti-doping center in Russia that meets Western standards. In Tyagachev’s words, about $1 billion was spent on the creation of such a center in China. That is why Chinese sportsmen were not involved in the Olympic scandals.

Perhaps, we are to do the same to skier Larissa Lazutina as has been done to Russian figure skater Irina Slutskaya? The skater was extremely happy yesterday: a gold medal “for an honest victory” was presented to her by Anton Bakov, a businessman from the Urals region, one of the May movement’s leaders. The medal was produced at the factory “Ural jewellers." The medal was made of 750 grade gold, and a ribbon for the medal was made by Anton Bakov’s wife. The businessman says that Russian athletes are our pride and such medals are just a small part of what can be done for them. The heavy medal made of pure gold and weighs 700 grams; it is certainly much better than a six gram Olympic gold that is made of a gold-covered silver plate.

Sergey Stefanov PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/main/2002/03/12/38121.html