Greece's poster boy misses drugs test

ATHLETICS: Kostas Kenteris, the Olympic 200 metres champion and the man tipped to light the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony tonight, is fighting to save his career.

He is facing the prospect of a two-year ban after allegedly failing to turn up for an out-of-competition test in the athletes' village last night.

A Greek team spokesman confirmed that Kenteris and Ekaterina Thanou, the Olympic 100m silver medallist at Sydney, had both missed drugs tests because team managers had allowed them to leave the village.

A missed drugs test is normally treated as a failed test and leads to immediate suspension from competition. The Greek team said it had made a written appeal to the International Olympic Committee to give the two athletes more time to undergo tests.

Kenteris has been thrown a lifeline by Istvan Gyulai, the general secretary of the International Association of Athletics Federations. "According to our information the Greek team leader was informed, but not the athletes," he said. "To our mind this does not constitute a refusal."

The IOC and the Greek Olympic Committee were locked in delicate talks last night as they tried to reach a solution.

Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, will come under pressure from both sides. On the one there will be the Greek government, who will fear their $6 billion investment in bringing the Olympics back to its birthplace for the first time in 108 years, risks being ruined before it starts by a scandal involving its billboard poster boy.

On the other there are Rogge's IOC colleagues, most notably Dick Pound, the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, who will remind the lord of the rings that earlier in the day he had promised that the Olympic movement would adopt "zero tolerance" on drugs issues and will want Kenteris severely punished.

Ever since Kenteris burst from seemingly nowhere four years ago to claim the Olympic 200m gold medal he has been promoted as Greece's own version of Cathy Freeman, the Australian who was the symbol of the Sydney games.

To honour the first Greek to win an Olympic gold medal on the track since Spiridon Louis emerged victorious in the marathon in the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, honours were bestowed on Kenteris.

These included a sign on the main street in Varia, the village on the island of Lesbos where the sprinter was born and raised.

A few miles up the road in Mytilini, at midnight each night the Aolos Kenteris pulls into dock from the Athenian port of Piraeus. Aolos is the Greek god of the wind. The Aolos Kenteris is one of the fastest ferries in the Greek passenger fleet.

Last month a poll voted Kenteris the most popular man in Greece. In Athens, where he has lived and trained for the past five years, his image is everywhere to be seen.

"Only the gods know the answer to that," Kenteris said last week when he was asked if Athens would host a successful Olympic Games.

Now his future is in their lap.