Exum only embarrasses himself with ` Olympic ' ...

Way back when, before performance-enhancing drugs began to dress up as supplements and before trainers became chemists dedicated to the science of keeping athletes both fast and legal, the name of the game was "sink testing."

That was the backroom term for what the governing bodies of some Olympic sports would do when an athlete asked the question, "Will what I'm doing get me busted?"

If the answer turned out to be, "Yes," then the athlete knew he or she had to back off before the next big competition. A little less ma huang sprinkled on the Post Toasties in the morning. Not so many anabolic brownies.

And the positive test?

Down the sink.

That was the climate in the 1980s and beyond in much of the Olympic community, and not just in the United States - regardless of the current bleating from other perpetually outraged countries.

Good Lord. There were still East Germans out there, shooting their athletes full of growth hormones and steroids and schnitzel until the women grew mustaches and the men sprouted tails.

How were the honest supposed to keep up?

Along comes Wade Exum, the former U.S. Olympic Committee director for drug control, to tell us that the United States kept up, all right, but not honestly.

Somewhere buried in 30,000 pages of documents that Exum gave to Sports Illustrated and the Orange County (Calif.) Register last week is the information that the USOC failed to act on approximately 100 positive drug-test results from 1988 to 2000.

Among the athletes who got a wink, a nod and a test tube down the sink, according to the papers, was Carl Lewis, the nine-time Olympic gold medalist from Willingboro, Burlington County.

It's a nice headline, but it doesn't do justice to either Lewis or any of the other athletes who competed as fairly as possible under the rules that were in place at the time.

"That was the policy then. Now the policy has changed," Lewis said.

The policy was that positive tests, particularly for extremely small infractions (what the USOC classified as "inadvertent use"), could result in only a warning and a sink test. International governing bodies - some of which might like nothing better than to disqualify Carl Lewis before the Olympics, huh? - weren't necessarily notified.

In the case of Lewis, and in nearly all the cases cited, the infractions were ridiculously tiny, if infractions at all. Lewis tested positive three times in 1988 for traces of banned stimulants, which he says came from an herbal supplement. In each case, there were fewer than 10 parts per million in his system - less than you would have from taking two Sudafeds. Even in the stricter world today, that wouldn't get you suspended.

Lewis went on to the Olympic Games that year and won two gold medals, including one he was awarded in the 100-meter dash when Ben Johnson of Canada tested positive for steroids - a dosing so strong that the whites of Johnson's eyes had turned a jaundiced yellow.

For critics of the United States to now claim Lewis should be stripped of that medal - equating him with Johnson, who was both dirty and dumb as a rock for being that dirty - is ludicrous. It diminishes the career of one of the greatest Olympic athletes ever.

Exum, whose purloined documents also name tennis player Mary Joe Fernandez and soccer star Alexi Lalas among others who received testing favors, has his own motivation in trying to embarrass the USOC. He was fired three years ago and responded by filing a wrongful termination and racial discrimination suit in federal court. That case, in which Exum planned to introduce his documents, was dismissed last week for lack of evidence. So Exum took his boxes of papers to the media, reluctantly, he said.

At the moment, Exum and his thin charges have grown tiresome. He's standing there with the 30,000 pages of blah-blah like Lenny Bruce reading his police arrest report to a shuffling audience trying to find its keys.

Was there sink testing in the United States way back when? Sure, and in Germany, France, Russia, China, Australia and everywhere else. Are the standards different now? Yes, but the cheaters are also better and don't need the complicity of their various federations.

The new information is interesting, but hardly earth-shaking. The documents mostly catalogue a bunch of borderline positive results that could legitimately have been dismissed, and were.

"I'm not the least bit defensive about the decision that was made," Barron Pittenger, the USOC director in 1988, told the Los Angeles Times.

The only one who should be embarrassed at the moment is Exum. He knew the information in his documents was more warped slingshot than smoking gun, but he tossed it out there anyway. In doing so, he tarnished the accomplishments of some great athletes whose knee-jerk critics won't care that the fine print isn't very incriminating.

Exum's "revelations" don't merit going down the sink. Another bathroom fixture would serve better.