David Leggat: Letting rumours flourish

Athletes getting on the sauce at major events is nothing new.

It's been that way forever and will continue to be a constant companion anywhere people operating in a pressured environment decide to let off steam. That's life, however much we may choose to frown on it.

After spending months preparing for their big day, many athletes feel entitled to a decent liquid blowout.

The trick is not to do it in public. As the night wears on, trouble is waiting with a beckoning finger for high-profile sports figures.

New Zealanders are no different from any other nation in this respect.

Dozens of tales of sporting drunkenness on minor and not so minor scales do the rounds. Some have taken on almost heroic proportions.

A few months back, Hayden Roulston's fisticuffs outside a bar put him up before a judge and threatened to derail his ability to ride professionally in the United States.

From Roulston, it is an easy segue to the Commonwealth Games cyclists and their misbehaviour in Melbourne this week. Roulston was the only rider singled out by New Zealand team management as not being one of those involved in the incident which led to a flurry of rumours, allegations and denials. Presumably that was because Roulston has "form".

Chef de mission Dave Currie initially said whatever happened in the athletes' village early on Monday morning was not an incident, but it had become one within a few hours.

No names would be revealed, Currie said, it was a trifling matter and there was disappointment it had come to the stage of Victorian police taking an interest, interviewing the New Zealand woman rider at the centre of incident.

These cyclists did their thing in public, which was stupid. Once you do that, as opposed to getting hammered behind the closed doors of a team room, trouble is only a pair of eyes away. Within a matter of six hours, names were being bandied about as the figures of interest, so to speak.

NZPA reported them on Thursday night as being track riders Marc Ryan, Tim Gudsell and a female New Zealand rider.

Australian newspapers reported allegations of a sexual assault - strongly denied - a person being urinated on and from there the story sprouted wings. A range of allegations of what happened were whistling about the large media room in Melbourne.

In one sense, issuing denials, hoping bad news would go away, is understandable. It is a human reaction to batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to pass.

But it also opens the door to ripe speculation. It takes on the nature of a boil festering away, not being lanced.

Had the team management - having taken the unswerving position that it was no big deal and no cyclists were in hot water - named the three and cleared the air at the first opportunity, the likelihood is the story would have died a natural death.

But then it ballooned amid claims of binge drinking New Zealand team members, naked laps and a fountain, all the ingredients for a sizzling tale growing by the hour. How much simpler life would be if management teams went the direct route. Name, shame, apologies all round, a verbal whack around the ear.