Drug net closes as China readies for clean Games

By Katrina Beikoff  |   2008-7-7  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

CHINA'S top backstroke swimmer Ouyang Kunpeng has been banned for life for doping, reminding us that the drug net is closing in on athletes prepared to cheat their way to glory at the Beijing Olympics.

Ouyang, No. 3 in the world in the 100-meters backstroke, is a cheat and has no place at the Games.

The swimmer took banned drugs to get an illegal edge and is no better - or worse - than other cheats.

Cheats like Marion Jones, the former fastest woman on the planet and one of the most celebrated athletes of a generation.

Cheats like her former husband and world champion shotputter, C.J. Hunter, and her former boyfriend and one-time world's fastest man, Tim Montgomery.

Cheats like superstar sprinters Justin Gatlin and Linford Christie, and infamous doper Ben Johnson who perhaps forever sullied the purity of displays of speed and strength at Olympic Games.

International sport seems to be never-endingly blighted by champions being exposed as frauds, cheats and liars.

I write this from the perspective of being the journalist who uncovered at the Sydney Olympic Games that Marion Jones' husband C.J. Hunter - who with Jones were expected to be the Mr and Mrs Olympics of Sydney - did not pull out of the Games due to a dodgy knee, but because he had returned a positive drug test.

Hunter was proved a liar, but not only was this a story about the drug test, but a cover-up by the United States Olympic Committee and US Track and Field organization.

The International Olympic Committee later went further with the stinging accusation that the Americans had covered up drug cheats for a decade.

At the time, despite her husband using steroids to cheat, there was no proof Jones was also doping - though she has since confessed to being a sporting con and has been stripped of her medals.

There will be 4,500 doping tests performed during the Beijing Games, up from about 3,600 at the 2004 Athens Olympics.