Scorecard

Yo! Yo! Ma?

Senior writer Richard Hoffer steered clear of mysterious potions before filing this report from the Asian Games in Hiroshima : Ma One, the homeopathic potion its inventor claims increases a runner's speed and endurance, had a small marketing setback during the Asian Games last week. For starters the Chinese women, who had smashed world track records last year but have been largely absent from the world circuit this year, were so slow that critics wondered if they could catch the turtles whose blood is a major ingredient in their training-table tonic. Oh, they won their gold medals, all right, but were well off their world-record times.

Then their coach and Ma One's chief chemist, Ma Junren, sabotaged sales when he explained away the subpar times as a result of "toxico-logical problems" that were possibly linked to appendectomies performed on 11 of his 12 athletes.

Gee, it couldn't have been the caterpillar fungus from his little elixir, could it?

Whatever sales were being made might have ground to a halt on that news. But Ma, who reportedly reaped a fortune on the sale of his formula, quickly put a different spin on the medical events. The toxicological problem, he said, was actually a case of food poisoning that was in no way related to his magic drink. As for the appendectomies, he told one member of the Chinese press that these were performed over the course of a year for preventive reasons. Yet he told another that he organized a mass surgery for his 11 athletes on a single day—"Do you know how much that costs?" Ma said—because their systems had been poisoned. Only Qu Yunxia, world-record holder in the 1,500, ran with a full complement of organs.

This story line played great in Hiroshima and may have even rescued Ma's marketing campaign. But among Chinese officials, who distrust the media-savvy supercoach, another story surfaced, and it had nothing to do with surgery or snake oil. Wei Jizhong, secretary general of the Chinese Olympic Committee, said Ma had been ordered to gear down his training after the record-breaking blitz. Athletes were said to be running the equivalent of 20 marathons a month, sometimes at high altitude, and were thought to be needlessly at risk.

As for any or all of Ma's explanations? Said Wei, "Ma talks too much."

Simpson Stuff

Jury selection may be going slowly, but the commercial blitz generated by the O.J. Simpson case is proceeding apace.

A bronze statue of Simpson , commissioned and marketed with his cooperation, is now available for $3,395. You'll have to act fast to get one of the 20�-inch statues—there will be a one-edition run of only 25,000. Also involved in the project are those two high-profile O.J. pals, Al Cowlings and Robert Kardashian.