Don't just say no to smokes, Kurt! Pretend to say no, too!

Copyright 1993 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.

The pressure on the Canadian Figure Skating Association to strip Kurt Browning of the national men's championship he won last Saturday night in Hamilton threatens to plunge the country into a grim replay of the scandal that saw Ben Johnson's gold medal taken away after he won the 100-metre dash at the Olympic Games in Seoul.

Johnson's victory - what would have been a world record time of 9.79 seconds - was wiped off the books when post- race tests indicated he had used performance-enhancing drugs. His medal was subsequently awarded to his arch-rival, Carl Lewis, who had finished second.

Browning's disgrace had nothing to do with drug testing after he skated- the tests showed he was clean - but with his behavior on the ice while he was skating. Nor did this relate to drugs in the performance-enhancing sense, but in what many regard as a performance-diminishing sense: cigarette smoking.

In his free-skating program, Browning astounded the packed audience in the arena and television viewers across the country by pretending to take a "drag" or "puff" on a cigarette. Spectators and judges were still in shock when he stopped in his tracks and did it a second time. Once could have been accidental, a reflex gesture by an athlete under competitive strain, but twice indicated beyond doubt that it was intentional.

It must be emphasized, despite confused eyewitness accounts, that at no time did Browning light up an actual cigarette, or take a "drag" or "puff" on one. It was done in pantomime, but that alone was going far beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior when cigarette smoking has come to be regarded as the nation's Number 1 health and social concern.

Browning's careless attitude will have a fatal effect on young people who were encouraged to start smoking after watching him, and more significantly on beginning skaters. Thousands of young men see Browning, national champion three times before this, as a role model.

"I don't care," said a leading member of the anti-smoking movement when it was pointed out that Browning had done nothing specifically illegal. "He can pee in a bottle all he wants. This is a moral outrage."

It happened at a particularly difficult moment in history. The costs of smoking-induced illnesses threaten to swamp the health-care program, and the government is proposing to levy fines of $ 50,000 on merchants - many of them mom-and-pop store owners who are already struggling in a recession - for selling tobacco products to people under the age of 19.

A government source said, "Browning was thumbing his nose at our efforts to improve national well-being."

It didn't matter that the skater took the "puffs" or "drags" as part of his performance's theme, which was based on Humphrey Bogart in an old movie called Casablanca. Bogart became famous for his protrayal of smokers. The common phrase "Don't bogart that joint" refers directly to the lit cigarette that was always fastened to his lower lip, and it hardly need be said that Bogart himself met an untimely death as a result of a smoking-related ailment.

"It looked," the government source said after Browning's victory, "as if he was on the ice as a spokesman for the tobacco industry. What if he had pantomimed buying smack and cooking it in a spoon over a candle and filling a hypodermic syringe with it and injecting it into his vein, and claimed this was based on Frank Sinatra in the old move The Man With the Golden Arm? There would have been hell to pay. Especially if he did it twice."

Times have changed from the days when Joe (King) Krol and Royal Copeland - "the Gold- dust Twins" - used to light up in huddles during Argonaut games, when Turk Broda took "a smoke break" in the Maple Leafs' net while play was at the other end, when Barbara Ann Scott's gold-medal performance left the St. Moritz rink littered with butts as she "out-Dietriched" Marlene Dietrich.