Olympic Committee Asks FBI to Investigate Internet Site

The U.S. Olympic Committee has asked the FBI to investigate an Internet site that sells banned steroids and offers tips on avoiding detection of performance-enhancing drugs.

The owner of the web site and Price’s Power International, Sid Price of Newport News, Va., said his business was legal.

“I’m not selling anything Wal-Mart wouldn’t sell,” he said, estimating that steroids were available on at least 50 spots on the Internet.

In a letter to FBI Director Louis Freeh, USOC President Bill Hybl said the web site was an example of the increasingly sophisticated methods used by athletes, coaches and trainers to get around doping rules.

“The United States Olympic Committee is committed to ensuring a level playing field for all athletes, and this kind of advertising has the potential to destroy the careers and health of existing and aspiring Olympians alike,” Hybl said.

Officials of the International Olympic Committee said they stumbled upon the Internet site, which offers strength builders such as the steroid Androstenedione amid promises of doubling testosterone levels for pennies a dose.

The Internet ad says Androstenedione is “perfectly legal for sale as a nutritional supplement,” and Hybl acknowledged in his letter he was uncertain if the web site violated federal laws.

Price said Monday that Androstenedione and other products he sold were “naturally occurring substances” licensed by the Food and Drug Administration as food supplements.

The IOC last week added Androstenedione to its list of banned performance enhancers, and the chairman of the committee’s medical commission, Prince Alexander de Merode, asked the USOC to do all it could to counteract the ad.

Hybl said his committee would comply.

Hybl also asked the FBI director to “pursue all avenues to determine if this kind of Internet advertising can, by any legal means” be stopped.

Jurisprudence

Former three-time boxing champion Wilfredo Gomez was arrested and charged with cocaine possession in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Police said they found Gomez using cocaine in his car along a stretch of public beach near the town of Loiza and confiscated six small bags of the drug. Police were conducting a routine search of the area when they spotted Gomez alone in his car.

Gomez, 41, was taken to the Judicial Center in Carolina, a San Juan suburb, and charged. He was freed on $1,000 bond.

Necrology

Bob Adkins, an end for the Green Bay Packers during the World War II era, died at 80 Saturday at Pleasant Valley Hospital in Point Pleasant, W. Va. He had suffered a heart attack Friday.

Adkins played in the NFL for 2 1/2 years before World War II, then enlisted in the Army just before Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. He played another season after the war, all with the Packers.

Willie Pastrano, a light heavyweight boxing champion in the 1960s and the man who taught Muhammad Ali to dance in the ring, died Saturday in New Orleans of inoperable cancer that started in his liver and spread. He was 62.

Nicknamed “Willie the Wisp,” Pastrano won the light-heavyweight title from Harold Johnson in 1963. He lost it when he was stopped by Jose Torres on March 30, 1965.

Names in the News

NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon was named 1997 driver of the year in balloting by a panel of national motorsports reporters. Gordon, who won the Daytona 500, the inaugural California 500 at Fontana and and the Winston Million en route to his second stock car racing championship, received 10 of the 12 votes.

Scott Verplank won his PGA Tour card by winning a qualifying tournament at Haines City, Fla. Verplank closed with a 71--his sixth straight sub-par round--and finished with a 22-under-par 407 in the $500,000 event. Blaine McCallister was second, six strokes back.

Forwards Barb Gordon of Glendale and Jeanine Sobek of Coon Rapids, Minn., were cut by the U.S. women’s hockey team. That brought the team’s roster to 23, three over the limit for the Olympics.

John Sanders, Nebraska’s baseball coach for the last 20 seasons, was fired last week after a dispute with an assistant coach, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. . . . Texas Christian hired Miami of Ohio Athletic Director Eric Hyman as its new athletic director.