Athens, Greece
Olympic Games
FIRST ATHLETICS GOLD WON AT OLYMPICS AS GREECE BRACES FOR MORE
DRUGS WOE
The first athletics medals of the Olympics went up for grabs on Friday as week one of the Athens Games drew to a close with the host nation facing another drugs case involving a Greek athlete.
Italy’s Ivano Brugnetti won the first of two gold medals due to be settled on the track on Friday after speeding away to victory in the men’s 20km walk at the sun-baked 70Â 000-capacity Olympic Stadium.
A total of 20 golds were to be decided in a day of competition that will see Ethiopian legend Haile Gebrselassie attempt to become the first man to win three Olympic 10Â 000m titles.
Gebrselassie is nursing an injured Achilles tendon, however, and is expected to come off second best to his protégé and training partner Kenenisa Bekele.
In other action, the big guns eased through to the second round of the women’s 100m in morning heats.
The athletics competition will be missing Greek stars Kostadinos Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou after they pulled out of the Games following the furore over their failure to attend a drugs test.
The controversy dominated the first week of the Olympics along with a drugs scandal in weightlifting that saw seven athletes kicked out of the games for failing doping controls.
Five lifters were on Thursday named as testing positive for muscle-building anabolic steroids while a sixth, Indian woman weightlifter Sanamacha Chanu, was later confirmed as showing traces of a banned diuretic.
The failed tests took the total number of lifters to have failed drugs tests to seven following the expulsion on Monday of 48kg-class lifter Nan Aye Khine, Myanmar’s lone entrant.
But local media reported on Friday that an eighth weightlifter — Greece’s 62kg-class bronze medal-winner Leonidas Sampanis — has tested positive.
Greek Olympic officials said they had been informed by the International Olympic Committee that an athlete had failed a drugs test, but did not identify the competitor concerned.
A later report quoted an anonymous source identifying the athlete as Greek weightlifter Leonidas Sampanis, a bronze medallist at the Athens Games. The report said a backup sample is being tested to determine whether the initial findings are accurate.
Sampanis finished third on Monday in the 62kg category.
World Anti-Doping Agency president Dick Pound said in an interview the body will seek to widen its net to target coaches and sports officials.
”There are very few accidental cases of doping. Most of them are organised programmes, designed by, implemented by, encouraged by and condoned by coaches and sports officials,” said Pound.
A new extension is to be made to the agency’s doping control form that every athlete must sign. Within the next few months, athletes will also have to list the name of their coach and doctor.
About 1Â 100 drugs tests have been completed at the Games so far with the weightlifters and a Kenyan boxer the only athletes from about 10Â 000 taking part to have failed.
As day seven got under way on Friday, the United States were level with China on 14 gold medals each, with Japan third on nine golds.
China increased their total to 15 by winning the women’s doubles table-tennis title, second seeds Wang Nan and Zhang Yining defeating South Korean third seeds Lee Eun-Sil and Seok Eun-Mi 11-9, 11-7, 11-6, 11-6.
The Chinese also guaranteed themselves another gold medal in the badminton tournament with Zhang Jiewen and Yang Wei beating Ra Kyung-Min and Lee Kyung-Won 15-6, 15-4 in the women’s doubles semifinals.
Two Chinese doubles pairs will contest the other semifinal to ensure an all-China final.
In the swimming pool, meanwhile, US prodigy Michael Phelps will attempt to win his fifth gold medal of the Olympics in the 100m butterfly later on Friday.
Phelps started the Olympics being hyped to equal or even better Mark Spitz’s record 1972 Olympic haul of seven gold medals.
That feat is no longer possible but the 19-year-old could still be left with an incredible six gold medals when the swimming draws to a close on Saturday.
Phelps helped the US medley relay team qualify for Saturday’s final with the fastest time on Friday. The Americans have never lost the event since it was first put on the Olympic programme in 1960. — Sapa-AFP