Paul Lewis: You can't hide idiocy

COMMENT

There is, on the face of it, little to connect the two rather bizarre scandals of Irish Olympic gold medal swimmer Michelle Smith and, here in New Zealand, the alarming mis-use of a toothbrush by New Zealand golf representatives Riki Kauika and Bradley Iles.

But there is ... it's a little thing called intelligence which is, so often, the difference between the good and the great.

You'd have to say that Smith is right up there when it comes to a great Olympic doping saga. Back at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, she won three gold medals and one bronze. But her sudden rise to the top created ripples bigger than she'd made on her way to the Olympic podium. Smith had never finished better than 17th in an Olympic event previously, was ranked 90th in the world in the 400m individual medley in 1993 but had knocked 17s off her personal best by Atlanta.

In swimming terms, that's like breaking the world land speed record in a supermarket trolley. It's like getting up before you go to bed. It turned out Smith had been "unavailable" for drug tests since 1995 onwards. Finally, after all the furore and finger-pointing, two drug testers turned up at Smith's home seeking a urine sample. She produced one but, when tested, it contained a level of alcohol that would be fatal if consumed by a human being. FINA, swimming's international body, said ... that whiskey had been added as a masking agent. Smith was suspended for four years.

Now, drug-testing methods are pretty strict. A drug tester, female, sits in (pun intended) while the sample is collected. You'd think the tester would notice a thing like a fatal amount of whiskey. But it came out in the official inquiry that the tester could not see what was going on as Smith was wearing a bulky jersey.

Quite apart from making me look sideways at my bottle of 20-year-old Islay single malt and wondering where it's been, this calls into question the intelligence of (a) Smith - for thinking that a toxic amount of whiskey in her sample would pass (pun again intended) muster and (b) the tester. Oh look, that nice young lady's put a thick jersey on, must be cold, wonder what that lump is, ooooh I heard a clink ... she must be cold.

Smith might be a good doping story, but the story about the young New Zealand golfers is just plain dopey. They went unsupervised to Malaysia where the unsavoury application of a team-mate's toothbrush took place - involving a region of the body for which it most definitely was not intended. There used to be a toothpaste ad in New Zealand which talked of a ring of confidence which may offer a pointer beyond which this column cannot go.

The real crime was that the toothbrush was then replaced in its normal resting place with the innocent victim none the wiser - with the only proof being a photograph being taken of the toothbrush being mis-placed.

Whatever you may think of the incident itself - and it's pretty nasty - you'd have to say that taking a photograph of this triumph of etiquette and breeding is outright dumb. It's right up there with the true story of the cretin in the UK who good-naturedly lent his neighbour a videotape. The borrower went home to do his taping, popped the tape in the VCR and was horrified to be confronted with pictures of the friendly neighbour in a compromising position with the family dog.

While you can't compare a drug testing scandal with rampant disregard of a toothbrush, you can compare the levels of intelligence of Smith versus Kauika and Iles. You can call it a youthful prank, maybe, but you can't hide daftness.

You can marvel at its source. Golf coach Mal Tongue, heard on radio this week, wondered why the victim, Kevin Chun, blew the whistle. He asked why didn't Chun instead find a way to get them back? He made it sound like it was a bum rap, all jolly japes between pals and nothing to do with representing your country.

The golfers, who unsurprisingly performed poorly at the recent Eisenhower Trophy, have been banned from travel unless there is management present. We can only hope Tongue is not that manager. What next - a hairbrush? A nine-iron? A telephone pole?

Youthful pranks can be left behind. Lack of intelligence is harder to overcome.