Internet Site Concerns USOC

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.

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.

Price said 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.

Boxing

Heavyweight George Foreman says he wants to fight again, but plans to wait at least another year--until after his 50th birthday.

“I’d like to have one last boxing match in Las Vegas--a 50-year-old man enters the ring with a top contender and then calls it quits,” Foreman, 48, told Fox Sports.

Foreman said he was “walking away” after losing a disputed decision to Shannon Briggs on Nov. 22 in Atlantic City, N.J.

Rodney Jones (19-2) knocked out Craig Kikta (16-2) at 2:25 of the first round at the Forum to retain his North American Boxing Organization junior middleweight title.

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

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 in 1965.

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.

Names in the News

NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon was named 1997 driver of the year in balloting by a panel of national motorsports reporters.

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

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 to fill the same job at that school.