With the prominent and widening evidence of who’s doing what and with which and to whom regarding substance abuse in athletics, people like Shirley Babashoff are feeling more vindicated each day.

Shirley, a brilliant swimmer in her prime, accurately blew the whistle on East German and Soviet Union laboratory rats about 30 years ago. She was branded a poor sport and whiner by some because she’d been beaten in Olympic events where she had every right to expect victory. It won’t happen, but Olympic officials should rectify the travesties 1972 and 1976. Babashoff is not the only performer cheated as the Iron Curtain crooks produced medal harvests via such goodies as steroid cocktails.

How good was Babashoff? Though she never won an individual Olympic gold medal, she collected two golds and six silvers. She won two world individual championships, 27 national titles, set six world records and was a member of five world-record relay teams.

In the ’76 Games, she entered with the world record of 8:39.63 in the 800-meter freestyle, lowered it by more than two seconds to 8:37.59 but lost to Petra Thumer of East Germany, who swam 8:37.14. Shirley again a won a gold for the relay and added silver medals in the 200- and 400-meter freestyles and 400-meter individual medley.

It was a common suspicion that the East German swimmers in particular (along with their Soviet Union comrades) were hyped on steroids. Some people mumbled; Babashoff spoke out. A sizable segment of the press, particularly the East European media robots, titled her “Surly Shirley.” U.S. officials did not cover themselves with glory for their lack of support for Babashoff, the first American to address the subject head-on.

It took a hellacious long time for her to be validated; for years she had nothing to do with the U.S. program.

Only 15 in 1972, Shirley entered the Olympics holding the world record of 2:05.21 in the 200-meter freestyle. She lowered that by swimming 2:04.33 in the final but Australia’s Shane Gould won. Shirley then won a gold on the 4 by 400 U.S. relay team and copped a silver in the 100-meter freestyle. At age 19 for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, she was regarded by some as a female Mark Spitz. By competing in all four glamorous freestyle races and both relays, she had great potential for six gold medals.

There was talk in ’72 that the East Germans and Soviets were running government training camps where “vitamin pills and injections” (what they told the young women being stoked up) were common. By 1976, an East German girl Babashoff had known as rather slight at age 14 had bulked up incredibly. Same for a lot of her teammates.

Perhaps you can recall those hard-faced female pachyderms the communists had prepped for the weight events. All sorts of unusual musculature. Some of them even could have beaten Ed Asner and Otto Schnellbacher in a hairy-back contest. A lot of them paid a steep price later, with all kinds of ailments, deformities and defects for children to whom they gave birth.

Said Shirley: “They had gotten so big, and when we heard their voices, we thought we were in a coed locker room. I don’t know why it wasn’t obvious to other people, too. I guess I was the scapegoat. Someone had to blame somebody. Something bad had to happen and it had to happen to me. I didn’t get the gold, I got the silver, so I was the loser, the one who complained.”

As the souped-up East Germans swam with Evinrude 75-horsepower thrust, Babashoff finished second four times and fifth once. Every loss was to an East German, all of whom later were found to be products of a state-sponsored program of scientific cheating with performance-enhancing drugs. You can be sure their quacks were also using the same kind of stuff for male athletes. But it was the women swimmers who made the biggest splashes.

Shirley coached swimming for a decade, as a single parent raised a son born in 1986, then worked with the postal service.

“I’m actually more angry now than I’ve ever been,” she told Christine Brennan of USA Today, “for all the girls who didn’t get the right medals. They’ve taken away some track medals after doping tests, they even shared medals in figure skating. I don’t understand why they can take away some people’s medals, or share them, and not take away the East Germans’ medals.”

That’s no more likely to happen, though, than for Olympic officials to give the men’s basketball team the gold medal it should have had in 1972 when crooked officiating handed it to the Soviet Union. The U.S. guys still refuse to accept their silver hardware, with justification.

But as evidence increases about the sophistication of substance abuse in many sports, Shirley Babashoff finally is getting some of the accolades (though not the medals) she fully earned in 1976 when she tossed jock abuse of drugs into the middle of the ring. Wonder how many of those hothouse freaks the Soviets and East Germans created are still alive and have healthy kids.

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Time was when you could get a fair pair of Chuck Taylor basketball shoes for about $5 and proudly take home a duet of those dandy Purcell tennis low-cuts for about 10 bucks. How in the world can some shoe-and-uniform outfit like Adidas give a school like Kansas University an eight-year, $27 million deal? KU is the flagship school for the company, sure, but how many other nifty deals is that outfit doling out? How in the world do they make enough profit to meet such lugs?

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Bear in mind that Jerry Colangelo, the Phoenix sports entrepreneur now in charge of Olympic basketball operations, played freshman basketball at KU in the mid-1950s before finishing up as an all-league guard at Illinois.