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Banned athletes innocent, says Cuba

The Cuban government hotly defended three gold medal-winners against charges of doping, and provided new evidence of their innocence.

In a televised message on Thursday night, president Fidel Castro lashed out at accusations of doping against high jump champion Javier Sotomayor and weight-lifters William Vargas and Rolando Delgado, all gold medal-winners in the Pan-American Games in Winnipeg in August.

Castro revealed that four days after reports in Winnipeg that traces of a steroid, nandrolone, were found in the urine of Vargas and Delgado, drug screening of the two athletes by three prestigious European labs - in Lisbon, Madrid and Barcelona - came up with negative results.

The government has all the necessary official documentation from the tests, he added.

"Nandrolone remains in the body for as long as six months," said Dr. Mario Granda, director of the Cuban Institute of Sports medicine, who provided scientific arguments substantiating the innocence of the weightlifters, and pointed to the rigorous controls employed in athletic training in Cuba.

''Nandrolone never existed in the bodies of the athletes, they do not need it,'' said Granda.

He also maintained that there were serious irregularities and errors in the technical procedures followed in the case of Sotomayor. The holder of the World record in high jumping was stripped of his gold medal in Winnipeg after a drug screening test revealed traces of cocaine in a urine sample.

Castro suggested the possibility of lodging a complaint that irregularities and mismanagement occurred at the Pan-American Games, while staunchly defending Sotomayor, who may be disqualified from next year's Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia.

And if a third member of Cuba's weightlifting team is charged with the use of steroids, the entire team could be disqualified from the next international sports event.

Cuba took 69 gold, 40 silver and 156 bronze medals in Winnipeg, which put it in second place after the United States.

"They want to eliminate the spectre of Cuba. They are afraid of our teams,'' said Castro. ''This is how they reward the efforts of a small country which had the glory of defeating the United States in a Pan-American competition, something that no other nation in the hemisphere has ever achieved.

''If they want we can return all of the medals we won in such a tough fight, and with so many adverse factors.'' But ''not even then could they wrest from us our title of World champion in defending healthy sports,'' he added.

Pointing out that the swiftly disappearing presence of traces of cocaine made it impossible to resort to scientific methods to demonstrate that the results of Sotomayor's drug screening were false, Castro questioned the credibility of the Canadian lab that carried out the test.

He also criticised the Pan-American Games organising commission, and the Pan-American medical commission, as well as the media, which he said jumped all over Sotomayor without taking into account ''more than 100 exams, many of them unannounced, which never found a single trace of drugs or steroids, and which gave proof of his clean and irreproachable athletic career.''

Castro is a staunch defender of amateur sports, and misses no chance to lash out against the United States and other countries that ''buy'' athletes throughout the world.

''The first competition is against the bandits dedicated to the task - more a political than an athletic one - of trying to buy Cuban athletes,'' Castro said while welcoming Cuba's national baseball team after it beat the Baltimore Orioles on their turf in the United States.

According to Castro, after that match, amateur athletes can no longer be underestimated, because the game was a competition between professional sports and ''the concept of sports as a right of the people.''

UNI