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LOS ANGELES, California, Wednesday (AFP) - Former world shot putt champion C.J. Hunter has accused the head of international athletics of offering to cover up his positive steroid test if he feigned an injury and withdrew from the 2000 Olympics.

Hunter told the San Jose Mercury News the IAAF wanted to avoid a major scandal just before the Sydney Games and the body's general secretary Istvan Gyulai made the offer before a meeting in Brussels on August 25, 2000.

Sandro Giovannelli, the IAAF competition director, also attended the meeting, which the News said Gyulai acknowledged last week had taken place, but denied he tried to hide a positive test.

At the time, Hunter was married to sprint star Marion Jones, whose pursuit of five gold medals made her the big story entering the Games. She won five medals, three of them gold.

Hunter said he was told to compete in the Brussels meet despite the drug test and then "say you got an injury and you can't compete in the Olympics".

Hunter's allegation comes in the midst of one of the biggest sports drug scandals since Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for a banned steroid at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

A September police raid of a San Francisco nutrition company headed by Victor Conte Jr., who came to Hunter's defence in the 2000 drug case, has led to a federal grand jury investigation that has included athletes from baseball, football and Olympic sports.

Officials have linked a new steroid, THG, to Conte's lab. Five track athletes and four American football players from Oakland Raiders have tested positive for the drug. Speaking publicly for the first time in three years, Hunter, 34, said the IAAF officials asked him not to challenge the positive test for nandrolone - a banned steroid that he denies taking.

"Don't say anything and we will make sure everything is fine so you can come back next year," he said they told him.

Hunter, from North Carolina, said he agreed to Gyulai's proposal because he had a knee injury and wanted to "do something for the greater good".

Hunter, the 1999 world champion who had qualified for the US Olympic team, underwent knee surgery and withdrew a week before the Sydney Games but went to Australia as Jones' coach. He officially retired in 2001.

The meeting in Belgium came a day after the IAAF notified USA Track and Field of Hunter's positive test. But Gyulai said Hunter misinterpreted the intentions.

"There was no back-room deal at all. There was a possibility to keep the confidentiality until after the Olympic Games - if he accepted that he could not compete," Gyulai said.

When asked about a misunderstanding, Hunter asked: "The IAAF protocol is to meet with the athlete? Why would you have a meeting, especially with two members that high-ranking, the day after notifying me?" Hunter's positive tests became public in Sydney, leading to charges that the United States had a history of suppressing drug cases and failing to tackle doping while lecturing the rest of the world.

Dick Pound, chief of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said then that the Hunter case looked like a coverup on the part of USA Track and Field. "The Hunter case proves that much of what the sports politicians have said about USA Track and Field has no basis in reality," US track chief Craig Masback said.

"Why anyone thought that we could have covered up a test conducted not by us but by an international agency I don't know. Making accusations not based on facts only serves to embarrass the international sports leaders who make them."

Reacting to a spate of negative attention over drugs in their sport, US track officials on Sunday approved a plan to ban athletes for life when they test positive for steroids, a tactic some international leaders called a publicity stunt.

At the 2001 world championships in Edmonton, Alberta, Gyulai told reporters that Hunter begged IAAF officials to hide the test results so Jones would not be upset.

Gyulai said he and Giovannelli met Hunter a few hours before the Brussels meet in an effort to keep athletes under the suspicion of a doping offense from competing.

"This was perfectly followed to the last letter," he said of IAAF protocol.

But Gyulai admitted that Hunter was allowed to compete that night despite having tested positive the previous month in Oslo, Norway.

"It had been discussed, before I saw him, with relevant doping experts of the IAAF," Gyulai said. "It was not a personal initiative. It was applying the IAAF procedures at that time." In Sydney, International Olympic Committee officials revealed that Hunter had tested positive for nandrolone four times that summer. Hunter said he never took banned substances and claimed a contaminated iron supplement he bought in Rome had caused the results.

STONE 'N' STRING

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