COLUMN: Canada's boarders violated by IOC

Jim Litke, Commentary The Olympics are in an uproar because a drug test turned up trace amounts of marijuana in a 26-year-old Canadian snowboarder named Ross Rebagliati. And because he's from the Great White North, and because he had a gold medal the International Olympic Committee could take back -- and wrongly did -- all of a sudden he's Ben Johnson? Un-unh. Or as the snowboarders themselves might add: No way, never, never, un-un-unhh. We are not saying laugh this off. Or that Rebagliati should be viewed as victim or hero, and especially not as a cause celebre. He violated the rules and got caught. But -- and this is a very important distinction -- he didn't cheat. And so Rebagliati didn't need to lose his gold medal, either, when a reprimand -- a remedy also available to the IOC -- would have been enough. An arbitration panel, acting on an appeal from the Canadian Olympic Committee, still has a chance to overturn the IOC's decision and restore his medal. But this episode probably has cost Rebagliati a chunk of his career and it may yet cost him much more. Even though there is nothing to suggest he smoked marijuana since arriving at the Olympics, according to a report, the local police plan to ask the IOC for his test results. In Japan, a conviction for marijuana possession can mean up to seven years in prison. That would be the only real tragedy in this whole overblown affair. The Johnson comparison, wrong-headed as it is in almost every way, does have some instructional value. The Canadian sprinter was caught taking stanozolol, an anabolic steroid that helps build muscle mass. And those were not trace amounts the lab caught him storing. And most important, the drug definitely had something to do with Johnson covering 100 meters at the 1988 Seoul Olympics in a world-record 9.79 seconds, a clocking erased from the record books and one that no sprinter has been able to touch, even a decade later. The amount of marijuana in Rebagliati's system would not spill off the head of a pin. It was 17.8 nanograms per milliliter, an amount so insignificant it almost makes his story about ingesting the marijuana as second-hand smoke believable. And let's be completely clear about the bottom line: The only possible way smoking marijuana would have done Rebagliati any good is if he'd been competing in halfpipe instead of giant slalom. Because in halfpipe (insert your own joke here) at least you get marks for artistry. You don't think the higher-ups at the IOC and the international ski federation, who are only too happy to count the new money that snowboarding is bringing in, wink at this kind of thing? Think again. The ski federation actually has an allowable limit for trace amounts of marijuana in its own drug tests. It's 15 nanograms per milliliter. The IOC, however, has a stated zero-nanogram, zero-tolerance policy. But in this instance, the decision to strip Rebagliati of his medal, as opposed to simply reprimanding him, barely had enough support to pass. IOC director general Francois Carrard said the vote was 3-2, with two members abstaining. Two things apparently swayed the IOC panel. One was the recommendation of a medical commission, itself divided by a 13-12 vote, that some action be taken. The other was that Rebagliati exceeded ski federation limits by 2.8 nanograms per milliliter, which wouldn't spill over the point of that same pin. All kinds of dire predictions and guesses are being made about how this event, however it plays out, will hurt snowboarding and chase away the corporate sponsors who jumped in with both feet hoping for a cut of the action. The answer is not at all. When all those clothing and equipment manufacturers looked out on the slopes where snowboarders gathered a decade ago, they didn't see Olympians or pot-heads, only people who could become customers for decades. It's hard to imagine either new sponsors or old ones being too shocked to learn that some number of snowboarders kick back at night with a joint instead of a cognac -- the drug of choice among some of their elders. Nobody cared about that until now. That's the sad, almost funny thing about all this: Rebagliati said he knew snowboarding had really hit the big time when the drug testers began showing up at meets. His mistake was thinking they were interested only in finding the cheats.