The dirty truth about
being clean

YOU had to feel for those four Olympic athletes up at that table, the four who conducted a press conference Thursday as part of the Honolulu Marathon expo at the Hawaii Convention Center. They had heard alleged steroid kingpin Victor Conte's comments on "20/20" and they had heard all they could take, and they had come to vent.

They say they're clean, but Conte had said that nobody is, that even the Olympics were all but a drugged-up sham.

And you had to feel for these guys.

First, because I believe them. They had honest faces, every one. They seem like nice people. They seem like good people. They look clean (Castle grad Bryan Clay, the local boy Olympic hero, has skinnier arms than you do). Their emotion is as real as it gets.

"I need to stop for a second," Olympic shot put silver medalist Adam Nelson said, only 30 seconds in. This subject made his blood pressure boil. He was already getting carried away.

Their faces. Even in anger they seemed like nice guys. They would be superstars in any other sport.

But I felt for them too because it seemed like that was their underlying point. Drugs in sports is not their real problem.

Their major problem is that track and field -- their life's labor, their love -- is not a major sport. It seems they're not as mad about competing against cheaters as they are that the only time people hear about track is when needles are in the news.

That's not to say they didn't advocate testing, strongly.

"Jail time," Olympic long-jump champ Dwight Phillips said.

That's not to say their goal isn't to keep the competition clean.

"I feel like those athletes are stealing from me," U.S. champion high-jumper Jamie Nieto said. "I feel like those athletes are thieves."

But they spent more time talking about getting positive media coverage for their sport.

"I think a lot of people hear the negative things, but nobody ever cares about the positive or the other people who get overlooked when things like this are reported on," said Clay, the Oahu native who won a silver in the decathlon in Athens.

Have any of these guys -- probably not, since they're competing at the time -- WATCHED the Olympics on TV? It's nothing but positive. (NBC would rather set its own cameras on fire than report that someone has failed a drug test. But then somebody goes and fails a drug test.)

Their problem is that people only follow their sport every four years -- Olympic years -- and then if somebody gets busted ...

Their problem is the only reason many of us would even think about their sport between Olympiads is drug scandal.

Which means their biggest problem is that between Olympiads very few are thinking about their sport.

They want to be positive role models, Clay said. They want the NFL, NBA, every major league to crack down on drugs the way track does, they said.

When you listen to what they're saying, they want to be famous.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. And these four guys are definitely the kind of athlete you would like to see become famous. They are proud of doing things the right way. It's a matter of ethics, personal integrity, they all said.

They don't want to be famous badly enough to cheat. "We're not that shallow of people," Clay said.

You get the idea that they would be famous the right way, too.

"The only reason that we are really here today is because we want to portray a little of a more positive outlook on our sport and on the athletes that do our sport," Clay said.

Their Catch-22 is that you're not going to get lauded for being clean unless there is a problem with drugs in the sport, and they're telling us that the problem with drugs in the sport isn't nearly as big as we think.

"I feel like I can beat those people," Nieto said, referring to the drug cheats. Of course, the problem is that they make news and he doesn't.

The problem is that without them, track and field doesn't make any news at all.