Last Thursday Meletis Zographos, a 26-year-old Greek man, was jailed for fraud. Zographos’s crime was to falsely present himself as a lawyer, and at a previous court hearing in Athens, he was sentenced to 14 months in prison. He tried to have the sentence overturned, but was offered only the option of paying a €5,000 fine in lieu of prison time.
Zographos didn’t have the money and so was jailed. Between the initial court case and the subsequent appeal, Zographos was busy helping Athenian police in another investigation. With witnesses to the alleged motorcycle crash involving the Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou thin on the ground, police were desperate to find anybody who actually saw the spill of the two stars. Remarkably, Zographos claimed to have been there.
He told police he saw the crash and the two sprinters lying hurt in the early hours of Friday, August 13. He also said it was he who returned the damaged motorbike to its owner Christos Tzekos, coach to the two athletes. At the time police were sceptical about the crash. They subsequently checked out Zographos and, let us say, their scepticism about the crash deepened.
And you get a sense of the fun and games at the 28th Olympiad. Forget the records in the swimming pool, the velodrome and the track, the record that mattered was the number of positive tests. By yesterday, it was 19 and counting. You think this constitutes a bad Olympics? Would it have been better for the cheats to have escaped unpunished? That is what has been happening at previous “good” Olympics.
Kenteris and Thanou were not the only athletes on the run. Like the sprinters, some qualified to compete but never got to the start line. A Swiss cyclist, two baseball players from the home country, a Spanish canoeist, a Kenyan boxer and an Irish distance runner were among those turned back at the gates.
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Once the Games began, weightlifters fell like ninepins. Competitors from Turkey, Greece, Myanmar, India, Moldova, Morocco and Hungary tested positive and had their credentials withdrawn.
The first final on the athletics’ programme, the women’s shot put, was staged at the ancient site of Olympia in an appropriate acknowledgement of history. That was applauded, and there cheering too when the Russian Irina Korzhanenko landed the shot a metre and a half further than everybody else. First gold medal in athletics to the lady in red.
Three days later, Korzhanenko was asked to return the medal: stanozolol in her urine. Nikolai Durmanov, head of the Russian anti-doping laboratory, doubted whether the athlete would have knowingly taken this old-fashioned steroid and spoke of “doping terrorism”. Korzhanenko herself was indignant and so it began; the catalogue of positive tests and consequent pleas of innocence.
Poor David Munyasia. The Kenyan boxer tested positive for the stimulant cathine, found in the plant miraa. Some Kenyan men use miraa to relieve boredom, and a Kenyan boxing official said it was unfair Munyasia should be sent home because “Kenyan women are forever complaining of under-performance from men who use miraa”.
Midway through the Games the Greek weightlifter Leonidas Sampanis tested positive for twice the permitted level of testosterone. He swore he had never taken the substance but remembered being at a cocktail party where somebody had spiked his drink. Unfortunately he couldn’t name the perpetrator.
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The Indian weightlifter Pratima Kumari blamed her coach who, she claimed, ordered her to take injections of God-knows-what, but it was the Hungarians who took the biscuit. Before the biscuit, they took the golds; Robert Fazekas in the discus, Adrian Annus in the hammer. Fazekas was caught with a bag of stored urine hidden on his body and disqualified. Annus and Fazekas are training partners, and the International Olympic Committee drug testers now believe Annus may have used the same ruse as his compatriot and got away with it. They decided to test him again but discovered he was already departed. Sample officers were sent to Annus’s home at Jak in Hungary, where they were threatened by a group of men. With a police escort, they returned the next day, but Annus was not at home.
“I am putting an end to my career,” said the gold medallist. “It isn’t worth going through all this, even for an Olympic champion’s title. I’m not going to allow them to manipulate the sample. That’s what this is all about, I can’t see any other reason for it. I’m being treated like a criminal.” All Annus had to do was pee into a bottle. Then, provided the urine was the same as that submitted after his victory, the gold medal and “the champion’s title” were his.
Instead of readily agreeing to be re-tested, Annus talked of being treated like a criminal. But maybe that is how those who deliberately cheat should be treated. What is doping if not fraud? The athlete cheats and through his dishonesty he wins a gold medal and earns a considerable amount of money. Those athletes who play by the rules are denied what is rightfully theirs.
You may have read about the long list of positive drug tests at the Olympics and wonder whether men like Kenteris, Fazekas and Annus are deserving of even a minute’s attention. Why, you ask, in a world full of wonderful sport should we acknowledge the presence of cheats? That is not a difficult question: if we weren’t now deriding them, we might still be applauding them.