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Informed sources told GulfWeekly today that a 'visibly distraught' Olympic gold medal winner, Rashid Ramzi, had denied taking any performance-enhancing drugs and has already requested a test on the 'B sample' taken after the event to prove his innocence.
Ramzi, winner of the 1,500 metres race at last year's Beijing Olympics in China, has tested positive for a new endurance-booster known as CERA.
The runner and his coach are presently in Bahrain and met with the Bahrain National Olympic Committee on Friday in Umm Al Hassam to discuss his current situation and how to proceed.
A meeting staged by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will take place in France on June 8. Ramzi could forfeit his gold - and the kingdom its first Olympic gold medal success - if the follow-up test of his thawed-out samples confirms his positive result.
Justice, it turns out, could be cheap. A shade over $29,000 a year. That's the running cost for the 'Tank', a grand-sounding name for what is really a row of industrial freezers where an anti-doping agency stores drug-test samples it has collected from athletes: thousands of them, ready to be defrosted and subjected to the latest cheat-catching science, should the need arise.
If the idea of keeping frozen blood and urine sounds weird, it makes perfect sense to Mehdi Baala.
The French middle-distance runner could now, belatedly, get an Olympic bronze medal thanks to drug testers at the IOC who had the good sense to keep samples they collect on ice.
After the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony last August, suspicions arose that some athletes at the Games may have been doping with CERA. So, armed with a new test for the banned hormone, the IOC defrosted 847 Olympic blood samples this January and put them through the wringer again.
Six Olympians tested positive, the IOC announced, as reported in GulfWeekly last week. One of them was Ramzi, the Moroccan-born runner who now competes for Bahrain.
Baala crossed the line fourth on that balmy Beijing night, just five agonizing hundredths of a second from the bronze.
Exhausted and crushed, Baala collapsed onto his back, his right leg sprawled over a track-side tray of flowers, pictured right.
This story would have ended there without the IOC's freezers. Disqualification of Ramzi would lift Baala to third place.
The cold metal of a medal can never fully substitute for the warm, lifelong memories - not to mention the likely sponsorship deals - that Baala might have enjoyed had he stood on the podium in Beijing. But it's a start.
"I'll be able to show it to my kids, to my grandkids and wear it around my neck," the French runner says. "Justice has been rendered." Listening to Baala's joy, tinged with sadness that he may have been robbed, one wonders how Ramzi will feel when the B-sample results are announced.
Sample-storage is 'an incredibly cost-effective way of providing a significant deterrent', says Richard Ings, who heads Australia's anti-doping agency. "The days of relying on one-off tests to catch doping athletes are long gone," he says. "This is the way of the future."
Ramzi and Bahrain, however, await the outcome to see whether their present day dreams are left shattered.
