Well able to cheat

THE Paralympics have been a great platform for promoting equal opportunity and encouraging participation, but the Games are also an elite sporting competition and winning medals can result in better government funding or a cherished sponsorship. Which means Games organisers have to deal with cheats.

"The Games are getting bigger, more competitive and there is more money coming into the sport, so the temptation is always there for those on the fringes, as in all elite sports," said John Fulham, spokesman for the Paralympic Council of Ireland. "We just have to ensure proper testing."

Officials will conduct some 1,100 urine and blood tests, 70 per cent more than at Athens, according to Wang Wei, a spokesman for the organising committee.Powerlifting is particularly prone to drugs, it seems, and three weightlifters have been sent home so far from the Beijing Games.

The Paralympics now have out-of-competition testing; the Pakistani powerlifter Naveed Ahmed Butt was the first casualty after testing positive for a banned anabolic steroid last week.

Facourou Sissoko of Mali and the Ukrainian Liudmyla Osmanova also failed pre-competition tests and were slapped with two-year bans.

The German wheelchair basketballer Ahmet Coskun was kicked out after testing positive for a banned drug he said was in a baldness treatment, bringing the total sent home to four.

"It's our aim to strengthen all the educational efforts to make sure that powerlifting becomes a fair sport in the Paralympics," International Paralympic Committee (IPC) medical and scientific director Peter Van de Vliet said in a statement.

Another illegal practice is "boosting", where athletes with spinal-cord injuries attempt to raise their blood pressure to unnaturally high levels, which can boost performance by up to 15 per cent. Some boosting techniques include sitting on ball bearings or pins or turning off catheters, forcing fluid build-up in the body.

They don't cause pain to the paralysed athletes but they do cause performance-enhancing adrenalin rushes or high blood pressure.

"It's extremely dangerous, possibly fatal," said Fulham, who remembers the practice took place on occasion during his competitive days and says athletes are tested for unnaturally high blood pressure.

The biggest cheats in Paralympic history used neither drugs nor boosting: in the Sydney Games of 2000, the Spanish team won the basketball event for intellectually disabled competitors. Subsequently, 10 out of the 12-member squad were found not to have any intellectual disabilities and the IPC removed all intellectual disability events off the programme for Athens.