Gold meddlers

THE Olympic Games likes its gods. When they were set up in 776 BC, it was as a tribute to Zeus. Hercules is credited with creating the clearing in the grove at Olympia and laying out the boundaries of the Altis, and the runner Leonidas was so good, winning every Olympic race over a 12-year period between 164 and 152 BC, that the people of Rhodes made him a local deity.

This is the kind of company that Costas Kenteris would have liked to share. And once upon a time, when he won the Olympic 200 metres in Sydney four years ago and then followed it with the World and European titles, he might have done. Until the Greek football team conquered Europe back in July, he was the ultimate contemporary Greek sporting hero.

Now, however, after the tragi-farce of Thursday night-Friday morning, he has shown himself to be utterly mortal.

If you want a mythical likeness, it would be better to look at Icarus, the young man who ignored his father’s instructions and flew too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax on his makeshift wings and the young man, having believed himself to have reached God-like heights, tumbled from the skies to his death.

The only death in this saga is the reputation of Kenteris and his training partner Katerina Thanou, a 100m silver medallist in Sydney. After failing to show up for a doping test, the pair went to meet their coach Christos Tzekos and then in the early hours of Friday morning ended up in hospital after they came off their motorbike.

As with much of Kenteris’ past, the exact details of events that night remain shrouded in mystery. Initial reports claim the two athletes missed the doping test because they had left the Olympic Village in order to go and collect some personal items from their homes. Later it emerged that they had gone to see Tzekos in Glyfada to the south-east of Athens.

When the pair came off their bike, the accident was said to have happened in Glyfada but it was dealt with by traffic police from Kifissia - in the north of Athens.

Confined to hospital they were unable to make a meeting with the IOC who subsequently gave them an extra 72 hours in which to explain their non-appearance. That allowed time for the Greek Olympic Committee to withdraw the athletes from the Games yesterday. When they face the IOC on Monday, the pair are likely to be facing a two-year ban from the sport.

It was the worst possible lead into Friday’s opening ceremony, especially as Kenteris was due to light the flame, but Jacques Rogge, the IOC president insists the Games are big enough to overcome the embarrassment.

"We have had big doping cases before that have not damaged the quality of the Games," he said. "Any athlete that we can catch, sanction and send out of the Olympic Village is a victory for sport. It strengthens the Games. The more we catch, the better it is."

The reality is, however, that the Kenteris case has already cast a massive cloud over these Games, although whether the expulsion of Kenteris and Thanou can actually be bigger than the one that hovered around the last-minute preparations for the Opening ceremony on Friday afternoon are doubtful. Then, Greeks were angry. This was their Games, the opening ceremony that would show the world that after 108 years on the road, the Olympics were finally coming home.

The Greeks were riding the wave of bonhomie and self-esteem. Their footballers had stunned the world by seeing off all-comers in Euro 2004 and they had stuck two fingers up at the rest of the world who had predicted that these Games would be a disaster. The stadiums were ready, the security teams were all in place and Athens was looking a picture. Kenteris and Thanou popped that bubble.

By Monday, however, when the first medals have already been awarded and the world at large is more interested in watching the athletes than a test tube, the pronouncement on the two sprinters will more than likely be met with a shrug of disinterest. As far as the Greeks are concerned, they have already gone.

The international community, on the other hand, will say that they had it coming to them. Kenteris and Thanou have walked on the dark side of the alley for some years now, their secrecy and evasion of grand prix events making them highly suspicious in the eyes of other athletes.

British athlete Darren Campbell tells the story of the medal ceremony in Sydney after he had won silver behind Kenteris. A fellow athlete came up to him and said: "Don’t worry, by the morning that will be gold."

There is a similar tale about Thanou who followed her silver in Sydney with gold in the European championship in 2002. Silver medallist Kim Gavaert told the press: "The Italian girl who was third came up to me after the race and said, ‘For me you are European champion.’ I cannot help thinking that the gold medal should be mine. I don’t think Thanou is clean. She is always hiding."

They have a habit of going missing. Last year, when they were supposed to be training in Crete they were spotted in Qatar, and earlier last week, Kenteris and Thanou missed a drugs test in Chicago when they decided to fly to Greece a day earlier than expected.

This latest doping case is just one more to add to an ever-growing list of athletes who tried to gain an extra advantage. They are so frequent - this brought the week’s tally for busts to five, two of the others being Greek baseball players - that we should no longer be surprised.

The current generation of athletes has grown up in an era of doping. In the days when drug testing was not as effective as it is today, the athletes of the old Eastern Bloc - the Russians, East Germans and Romanians in particular - had a systematic doping programme for all of their athletes. The Chinese, when they operated a Kenteris-like hideaway policy, were all for stimulants. It was not until Ben Johnson was caught after winning the men’s 100m in Seoul in 1988, that anti-dopers started to make some headway.

Even they could do nothing about the American Florence Griffith-Joiner. When she smashed the women’s 100m world record in 1988, running a time of 10.49 seconds, eyebrows were raised but nothing was proved. It was an astonishing time but Flo-Jo’s innocence is thrown further into doubt not only by her early death, caused by a steroid-related heart condition, but by the fact that in the 16 years since she set it, no one, not even Marion Jones, has come close to breaking it.

Jones, who is in Athens to compete in the long jump, is another to have been embroiled in the doping issue, her name having been attached to the ongoing investigation into Victor Conte. His company, Balco, was effectively a laboratory for developing "cleverer" drugs that could not be detected by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Jones has been implicated in the case but not accused, but her boyfriend Tim Montgomery, the 100m world record holder, is facing charges in spite of never having failed a drugs test. Kelli White, the world 100m and 200m champion, was stripped of her medals after testing positive for the stimulant modafinal, and last week Torri Edwards, the woman who was given White’s 100m crown, was herself banned for two years for using nikethamide, another stimulant.

In Britain, Scottish sprinter Doug Walker has completed a ban while cyclist David Millar and English sprinter Dwain Chambers have both missed out on Athens for testing positive for stimulants.

With all of this going on, it is easy to be cynical about the value of what we see on the track, but the International Amateur Athletics Federation is at pains to point out how limited positive drugs tests are. On its website it claims that the percentage of athletes who test positive for banned substances is extremely low.

"In 2002, of 3,018 tests carried out by the IAAF both in and out-of competition, only 86 were positive. This represents 2.85% of the results."

The only problem with that is that thanks to people like Conte and Balco, more drugs are being developed that cannot yet be detected. By the time WADA cottons on, the drug dealers will have developed the next generation of undetectable stimulants.

The anti-doping authorities are certainly getting cleverer and their decision to pursue cases where there is paperwork to back it up, even if there is no positive test, can only increase the number of athletes brought to book.

The question remains, however, of why athletes persist in doing it. Money is often seen as a persuading factor. Better performances mean increased income from sponsors and the chance to get amid the prize money which can be extremely lucrative at the top end of the scale.

Professor Dave Collins, chair of Physical Education and Sport Performance at Edinburgh University, said: "It’s very simple. People cheat to be better. The top athletes want to win medals, they want success and this gives them a better chance of achieving that.

"A sportsman who is committed to his sport and is thinking of using drugs will weigh the chances of success against the chances of detection. Some people are rushed into it: for example, those who have had injury problems and want to catch up. For others, it is a pretty well thought out process.

"A lot of people will take drugs because others are taking them and winning. They will have a rationale to justify this, like a smoker who tries to justify that they’re not dying from lung cancer. Studies have been carried out in which athletes were asked if they could be given a drug that was undetectable and could give them success for five years but take 10 years off. Most said they would take it.

"To be good at sport some people say you have to be obsessive-compulsive. The sport becomes a huge part of your life and if that changes all of a sudden it can lead down many avenues, including drugs.

"Of course, it can also lead to other routes, like researching using the latest technical developments and so on.

"I don’t think financial rewards are an incentive for sportspeople to take drugs. These people are vastly committed to their sport and financial success is secondary."

Scottish 400m runner Iain Mackie, who competed at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, believes athletes turn to drugs to satisfy their desires for success.

"I’m glad to see more testing and sport will benefit in the long term I’m sure. It will act as a deterrent and make people think twice about taking performance-enhancing drugs," he said. "I think people use them to give themselves any edge over their competitors, but we all have a desire to win and not everyone turns to chemicals.

"For the past two to three years there hasn’t been a level playing field for athletes. The ones who are honest have had to watch the cheats claiming medals and any complaint is made to look like sour grapes. It wasn’t worth the trouble as those who spoke out ran the risk of being branded a sore loser or even being sued.

"I think drug use may even have influenced other sportsmen to indulge. Those desperate enough to want to win but who were always beaten by the cheats may have been sucked in.

"Personally, I couldn’t do it, knowing that chemical enhancement had helped me win a race. I pride myself on having talent and my success comes from that and from my hours of hard work put in on the track."

Irish 10,000m runner Cathal Lombard, who was banned on Friday for two years for using the performance-enhancing drug EPO, at least showed a humble side to his downfall, admitting his guilt - a rarity among sportsmen - and apologising for cheating.

"I didn’t set out to try and win medals or to make money," he said. "I just wanted to be as competitive as I could and have an equal chance with everyone else.

"My eyes were really opened from conversations I had with people on the professional scene. I looked at some of the times being consistently run and I asked myself if this was possible naturally. The only logical conclusion I could reach was that, in a lot of cases, the answer was definitely ‘no’."

Quite why Kenteris and Thanou have left themselves open to suspicion now is baffling in the extreme. Having achieved their success in Sydney, their hero-status and all that goes with that in Greece would not have been affected even if they had failed to qualify for the finals.

Kenteris has a tramline in Athens named after him and a ship, the ferry that takes passengers from mainland Greece to his home island of Lesvos. The owners may discover that passengers are a little less keen to travel on them now.

TESTING TIMES FOR SPORTS STARS

CALVIN HARRISON

EARLIER this month, the American sprinter was suspended for two years for a second doping violation that ruled him out of the Athens Olympics. Harrison tested positive for the banned stimulant modafinil at the 2003 US national championships. His first doping offence occurred at the 1993 US junior national championships.

DAVID MILLAR

THE Scots cyclist faces being stripped of the world time-trial title he won last year after he admitted using EPO. Millar, 27, was forced to pull out of this year’s Tour de France and the Olympics after using EPO. Millar confessed to French judge Richard Pallain during an investigation into drugs allegations against Millar’s team, Cofidis.

BEN JOHNSON

AT THE 1987 World Championships in Rome, he gained instant fame when he beat Carl Lewis and set a world record of 9.83 seconds. In the 1988 Olympic final, Johnson beat Lewis, clocking a new world record of 9.79 seconds. Days later, however, Johnson’s urine samples were found to contain steroids. He was disqualified and later admitted using drugs when he ran his 1987 world record. The IAAF deleted his time from the record books.

LINFORD CHRISTIE

BRITAIN’S former Olympic sprint champion, Linford Christie was suspended from athletics after failing a drugs test. Christie, a 1992 Olympic champion, tested positive for nandrolone at an indoor meet in Germany, in February 1999. The 39-year-old sprinter, who had retired from serious competition, vigorously defended himself against the charges.

GREG RUSEDSKI

THE British tennis number two pleaded his innocence after failing a drugs test that took place on July 23 last year at the RCA Championships in Indianapolis. Rusedski tested positive for nandrolone but was cleared of the doping offence this year.