THERE have been a few moments in these Olympics that will live long in the memory, images of Matthew Pinsent, Kelly Holmes, Amir Khan and Paula Radcliffe among them. Yet if you want the picture that summed up the serious issue at the heart of these Games, it was Kostas Kenteris, walking out of an Athens hospital and on his way out of the Olympics.
Kenteris, the reigning 200m champion, was a man reduced to the role of pantomime villain in the eyes of the rest of the world, the athlete who had dodged a drugs test and then apparently staged a motorbike crash to provide an alibi for him and team-m
ate Katerina Thanou, the other runner who had been mysteriously absent when the dope-testers came calling.
Both proclaimed their innocence, but both decided to walk away from these Games before they’d even argued their case. When the International Olympic Committee dangled their accreditation passes in front of the world’s cameras, you couldn’t help but be reminded of a 19th-century hunter displaying the heads of the animals he had caught.
And this has been the Olympics when the battle against the cheats has become a lot closer. For years, it was a one-way street for those who injected or ingested their drugs, the promise of victory far more tempting than the fear of exposure. Only the unlucky or the stupid were caught. Ben Johnson’s downfall did little more than to warn the cheats not to become complacent.
But here there has been a feeling that the challenge is more evenly contested these days. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), set up in the aftermath of the Sydney Olympics four years ago, has proved a huge success. Instead of stumbling through dope-testing in a haze, the rules are now regulated and overseen. So has the smart idea of convening the Court for Arbitration in Sport here in Athens, so that the inevitable appeals can be heard quickly. The whole atmosphere has changed, so that now the presumption appears to be in favour of the dope-testers and in favour of swift and decisive decision-making.
And the test of it all was Kenteris. At other Games in the past, I suspect that his behaviour was exactly the sort of embarrassment that would have been hushed up and pushed aside. Yet here, he was humiliated and forced to jump before he was thrown out of the Olympics.
"He was about a nanosecond from being expelled," said Dick Pound, the head of WADA. Did he not have any sympathy for Kenteris and Thanou’s explanation that they’d been involved in that motorbike crash? "What crash?" sneered Pound. "There’s no evidence that the crash ever happened."
The frustration for Pound is that the pair were never properly disciplined. By handing in those accreditations, and withdrawing from the Games, they were suddenly beyond the reach of the International Olympic Committee. Privately, the IOC were furious and frustrated, and made it quite clear they expect justice to be meted out by the IAAF, the world governing body of athletics.
And that, according to any number of people here, is the acid test of the world’s new-found determination to stamp out doping. Pound himself is dubious, wondering aloud whether the IAAF has the gumption to really tackle drug use within its sport. "Why haven’t they just got on with it and banned Kenteris and Thanou," he said here. "Why is there always a delay with the IAAF? The IOC took action speedily and looked decisive. I don’t know why the IAAF can’t just try to be the same. But they’ve got to prove themselves now. They can’t run away from this."
Of course, doping isn’t restricted to athletes, even if they are the ones who tend to hog the headlines. Athens has proved to be another Games where the weightlifters have attracted more attention for their doping than their lifting. Remarkably, among all the many sports that are entwined with the Olympics, it’s weightlifting that accounts for nearly half the positive drug tests in Games history.
Sad, but inevitable. Just look at the size of these competitors. They are vast mountains of muscle, and while there’s plenty of them who are, no doubt, honest, decent and simply dedicated, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a decent cross-section who realise that their only hope of bulking up enough is by visiting the pharmacist after they’ve left the gym.
I’m not sure that weightlifting can survive as an Olympic sport, especially in an era when the likes of Pound and IOC president Jacques Rogge are so forthright in condemning the dopers. It’s not just that some weightlifters cheat, it is that the sport is so tarnished it will be very hard for it to recover. There was a move some time ago to drop weightlifting from the Olympic roster until it had sorted out its house. I wonder if that threat is about to rise again.
And yet this has been a good Games for those trying to catch the cheats. Of course there will be those who have won medals here despite using drugs, and there will be those who passed dope tests because they were canny rather than honest. But the net is slowly closing, and for that we should all be grateful.
The full article contains 935 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
