NOTHING CAN BE GAINED FROM INVESTIGATING FLOJO.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

Florence Griffith Joyner will be laid to rest today in Lake Forest. Here's hoping all the innuendo surrounding her death is buried with her.

Whether or not her 10-year-old world-record performances in the 100- and 200- meter dashes were fueled by steroids or human growth hormone is largely irrelevant now.

No finding in the autopsy report is going to bring track's glamour gal back to life. And let's get real: no coroner's discovery is going to stem the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports.

As long as there is one ego to be pumped and one endorsement dollar to be pursued, there will be a market for illegal substances.

Onetime Oakland Raider Lyle Alzado acknowledged that steroid use contributed to his poor health and yet years after his death, athletes continue to use the stuff. People know the link between smoking and cancer and still they insist on lighting up.

It's preposterous to think the death of one woman, even one as wonderful and charismatic as FloJo, will save people from themselves.

What if Griffith Joyner used drugs to get faster and they shortened her life? What difference would that make to the five dozen U.S. runners polled 10 years ago who were so determined to dominate they said they'd take a pill to become an Olympic champion even if they knew it would kill them in five years?

One world-record holder's untimely death at the age of 38 won't change the mindsets of people who measure their worth in hundredths-of-a-second and have such a myopic focus that 10 years might as well be infinity.

Nor will it make the biological clocks of world-class athletes tick any less emphatically. Time is especially precious for those who toil in Olympic sports, their careers largely defined by a fortnight every fourth year.

It's a tough conundrum to crack, having endless dreams and a fixed horizon. How Griffith Joyner reconciled the two on her way to becoming the fastest woman on the planet is less important at this juncture than how the athletes of today and tomorrow go about it.

You can only hope common sense outruns commerce and the competitive spirit. Anyone who needs a coroner's report to drive home the point that there are risks in choosing the pharmaceutical route to glory is proceeding recklessly indeed.

Any further speculation on which path Griffith Joyner took serves no one and, in fact, hurts the ones who already are in the most acute pain. Addressing reporters the day after Griffith Joyner died in her sleep, Bob Kersee, the sprinter's brother-in-law and former coach, implored people to think of Mary Ruth, the 7-year-old daughter Griffith Joyner left behind.

``How would you feel if someone was spreading false rumors about you, and your daughter has to go to school and live with these things that have not been (proven) factually true?'' Kersee said.

If Griffith Joyner's husband Al, himself an Olympic gold medal-winning triple jumper, knows something about FloJo that the rest of us don't, that'll be his cross to bear. It's best now for us to remember her as someone who rose from the hardscrabble streets of Watts to become a woman of splendorous style and substance.

That's how she was portrayed by mourners who flocked to the Angelus Funeral Home in Los Angeles on Friday to pay their final respects. People remembered her spectacular performance at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul but reiterated how, even when the world went bonkers over FloJo, she remained ever-gracious and grounded. She may have been faster than everybody else, but she never acted better than anybody.

She taught and titillated us in life. If we learn anything from her death, may it be to celebrate our own lives as she did hers.

It's high time to look at her death from the same perspective as hurdler Greg Foster. A close friend of Griffith Joyner, Foster said, ``The fact that she's gone is sad. How she left us is neither here nor there at this point.''