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LONDON: The Beijing Olympics will see the biggest
anti-doping effort in history but the omens for a drug-free Games
are not good.
Alongside steroids and the
blood-booster EPO, testers have promised developments in tracing
substances such as human growth hormone, which are undetectable with
standard testing methods.
The chairman of the International
Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Medical Commission, professor Arne
Ljungqvist, said recently, “While it is to our advantage to not
release all the details, enhanced testing will be administered in
Beijing.
“You can expect continued
efforts to detect human growth hormone and EPO.”
Regardless of the improved tests,
past Olympics have shown that some competitors will risk everything
to win medals—and there is no reason to believe Beijing will be
any different.
It is a depressing statistic that
in the blue-ribbon Olympic sport, athletics, doping clouds hang over
three of the last five men’s 100-meters winners.
Canada’s Ben Johnson
notoriously caused the biggest drugs scandal in Olympic history when
he tested positive for steroids after charging wild-eyed to victory
in 1988 and was forced to leave Seoul in disgrace.
The reigning champion, Justin
Gatlin, is serving a four-year ban for using steroids after the
American failed a test two years after winning impressively in
Athens.
And 1992 winner Linford Christie
was refused a place on Britain’s 2012 Olympic torch relay after he
tested positive for the steroid nandrolone late in his career,
although there is no evidence the Briton was on drugs when he
triumphed in Barcelona.
Perhaps no former Olympic
champion has fallen as far as Marion Jones, a triple gold medal
winner at the 2000 Sydney Games, who is currently serving a
six-month jail sentence in Texas for lying to investigators about
her drug-taking.
US sports officials hope a line
has been drawn under a dark chapter with the conviction in May of
athletics coach Trevor Graham—who guided both Gatlin and
Jones—for lying to federal investigators over the Balco laboratory
scandal which embroiled so many stars.
A doping furor nearly ruined the
start of the Athens Olympics four years ago, when home sprint stars
Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou were allegedly involved in a
motorcycle accident, apparently to avoid taking pre-competition
tests.
Once the action got underway,
Russia’s Irina Korzhanenko was forced to hand back the women’s
shot putt gold medal after she was found to be taking the steroid
stanozolol—the same substance Ben Johnson used 16 years earlier.
--AFP
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