Fani Halkia from Greece thinks that she was made the victim of sabotage “by third parties” over her failed doping test.

The 29-year-old made the claim in a written testimony she delivered to Athens prosecutor Costas Simitzoglou.

From Espnstar.com:

Halkia, who won the gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles in Athens in 2004, has consistently denied since testing positive for methyltrienolone on August 16 that she knowingly took steroids.

“In the three months before the Olympics, I undertook 18 doping tests. No other athlete has ever been subjected to doping controls of such frequency,” said Halkia in her statement.

“I always cooperate with the submission of doping controls because I know that I have never made use of prohibited substances.

“I never knowingly took a banned substance, and I never knowingly used methyltrienolone at the Olympics.

“The action attributed to me is a malicious act by third parties that I was unaware of.”

The prosecutor is investigating her to see if she broke Greek law by taking banned substances.

Tags: doping, doping controls, methyltrienolone, steroids

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Suspended national coach Christos Iacovou has been accused by Christos Konstantinidis, the former Olympic weightlifter of giving banned substances to athletes.

Konstantinidis, who represented Greece at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, provided evidence to a judicial investigation set up to look into a recent doping scandal in which 11 members of the 14-member national weightlifting team tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltrienolone.

From Reuters.com:

“The former athlete told the prosecutor that Iacovou had urged him to take banned substances and that when he refused he found himself off the national team,” the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Konstantinidis made identical claims in 1997 but was then forced to sign an apology for fear of losing his job with the police.

The court official said Konstantinidis told the prosecutor that despite signing the apology 11 years ago, he had never retracted his comments.

“He stood by what he had said in 1997 and he repeated those claims today again,” the official said.

Nikos Kourtidis, one of the three weightlifters who did not test positive said, however, he did not believe that Iacovou would give steroids to his athletes.

Prosecutor Andreas Karaflos was told by Konstantinidis that Iacovou had pressed him to take banned substances in 1997.

Tags: anabolic steroid, Christos Konstantinidis, methyltrienolone, Seoul Olympics

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Fani Halkia, Greece’s former 400m hurdles Olympic champion, has been handed over a ban of two years for her positive dope test at the Beijing Games, according to an announcement by the Greek athletics federation.

The athletics federation confirmed the decision made by its judicial committee for awarding a punishment to the former star.

From Foxsports.com.au:

A gold medallist at Athens in 2004 Halkia was expelled from the Beijing Olympics after testing positive for the banned steroid Methyltrienolone.

Halkia, her coach and two other athletes who failed tests also face maximum sentences of five years in prison in Greece over their respective cases.

The four suspects deny any wrongdoing and Halkia claims she was the victim of sabotage.

The same drug had previously been found in the samples of over a dozen Greek athletes in other disciplines, severely embarrassing Greek authorities in the run-up to Beijing 2008.

The International Olympic Committee hired legal representation in Greece and sued coach of Halkia for bringing damage to its reputation.

Tags: dope test, Fani Halkia, methyltrienolone, Olympic champion, steroid

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A Court Official has remarked that suspended Greece Coach Christos Iacovou has been accused by former Olympic weightlifter Christos Konstantinidis of giving banned substances to athletes.

Konstantinidis represented Greece at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and was offering evidence to a judicial investigation that was established to look into a doping scandal in which 11 out the 14-member national weightlifting team tested positive for methyltrienolone, the anabolic steroid.

From Foxsports.com.au:

He told prosecutor Andreas Karaflos that Iacovou, who has been suspended by the Greek Weightlifting Federation pending the outcome of the case, had pressed him to take banned substances in 1997.

“The former athlete told the prosecutor that Iacovou had urged him to take banned substances and that when he refused he found himself off the national team,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Konstantinidis made identical claims in 1997 but was then forced to sign an apology for fear of losing his job with the police.

The court official said Konstantinidis told the prosecutor that despite signing the apology 11 years ago, he had never retracted his comments.

“He stood by what he had said in 1997 and he repeated those claims today again,” the official said.

Nikos Kourtidis, one of the three weightlifters who didn’t test positive, was of the view that Iacovou would not have given steroids to his athletes.

Tags: anabolic steroid, Christos Iacovou, Christos Konstantinidis, doping, methyltrienolone, steroids

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The International Olympic Committee officials are not happy with the Greek Olympic Committee’s decision to let Greek Olympic hurdler, Fani Halkia, carry the torch during the torch relay through Greece.

Halkia was banned two years ago due to a positive test for an anabolic steroid, metribolone, at the Beijing Olympics. Metribolone is also known as methyltrienolone or R1881. It is a derivative of trenbolone and is a potent anabolic steroid. Metribolone, however, has a high potential for hepatotoxicity.

Halkia however, won a gold medal in Athens, so Greek Olympic officials considered her as one of the torchbearers for the Olympic torch relay. She won a gold medal in the women’s 400m hurdles in Athens. She set an Olympic record of 52.77 seconds during the semifinals.

During the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing on August last year, Halkia was announced to have tested positive for metribolone. She denied using such substance and requested a B sample to be tested the next day. Her B sample also yielded the same results. On December 12, 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) finally announced that she would be banned from participating in any competition for two years.

From Deadspin:

The Vancouver games are only starting the torch relay, and we’ve already got a doping controversy. Oh, Olympics, how we’ve missed you.

Tags: Fani Halkia, methyltrienolone, metribolone, trenbolone

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This year is Olympic year so it’s more interesting than the previous years as far as doping is concerned.

Remember the canny seven Russian track and field athletes who resorted to urine swapping to pass drug tests?

The International Association of the Athletics Federation officials became suspicious when said women athletes were always present for unannounced random tests. The Russians were also very punctual, arriving at testing places even before the IAAF officials got there.

“There were no ‘no shows’,” one official told Reuters. “The Russians were always there.”

So the officials started storing the athletes’ samples. Further investigation revealed that the latest urine samples provided by the athletes did not match the DNA of the stored samples. The Russians were later suspended. The athletes include Tatyana Tomashova, the two-time world 1,500 meters champion; and Yelena Soboleva, the world indoor 1,500 meters champion.

And who wouldn’t remember the Greek athletes who figured prominently in this year’s doping list because of quite a handful of failed dope tests.

In March, eleven of the 14 members of the Greek weightlifting team tested positive for the steroid methyltrienolone in out-of-competition testing in Athens. Then there was champion hurdler Fani Halkia, sprinter Dimitris Regas, and Anastasios Gousis who got banned for testing positive also for methyltrienolone. All Greek athletes were suspended for doping.

In Tour de France four riders, including the third finisher Bernhard Kohl, were suspended for testing positive for CERA, the new generation variant of the blood-boosting drug EPO

There was Marion Jones’ sprint in and out of jail for her use of performance-enhancing drugs and her involvement in a check fraud case. Jones began her six-month jail term March and was released September 5.

The NFL’s diuretic case also was in the news which involved several athletes who blamed the StarCaps weight-loss pill for their failed dope tests. Pat Williams and Kevin Williams of the Vikings were among the players who tested positive for the masking agent bumetanide.

The Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds anabolic steroids cases also dominated the sports scene in 2008 and are expected to remain in the headlines in 2009. The much-awaited Barry Bonds trial will commence March next year

Tags: Barry Bonds, Bernhard Kohl, Bumetanide, CERA, Fani Halkia, Greek athletes, International Association of Athletics Federation, Kevin Williams, Marion Jones, methyltrienolone, most controversial doping cases, NFL, Pat Williams, Roger Clemens, Russian athletes, steroids, Tour de France, Yelena Soboleva

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A big “OOOPS” from the anti-doping officials.

The 300 or so test results, which had initially been reported missing by a team of independent observers during their recent visit in Beijing, have been traced by the International Olympic Committee. All tested negative for prohibited compounds.

According to the AP report, the team of 10 observers had been tasked by the World Anti-Doping Agency to review the Beijing Olympics drug-testing program.  The missing test results had been included in the team’s final report to WADA.

“Once the laboratory had apparently delivered all reports to the IO (independent observer) team, it transpired that around 300 test results were missing in comparison to the doping control forms,” the WADA report said.

“Regarding the ‘300 missing tests,’ it is our understanding that there has been a communication problem between the Beijing laboratory and the IO team on the results of a number of tests,” IOC spokeswoman Emmanuelle Moreau said in an e-mail. “The results of these tests were communicated to the IOC by the end of August. All were negative. The results have now been transmitted to the IO team.”

Apparently, the team conferred with the IOC’s medical commission regarding said results’ status, but IOC was unable to finish processing of the lab results in time for the group’s completion of their final report last month.

The procedural lapse had put the credibility of the anti-doping program in the Beijing Olympics. Additionally, the team reported another significant loophole in IOC’s control doping process at the Beijing Olympics.  It was found out that 102 of the 205 participating countries failed to provide sports officials with whereabouts information regarding their athletes. Such information is needed to implement pre-Games and out-of-competition testing.

It was not all negative points for the IOC however. The WADA group gave their thumbs up to the increased number of overall tests (4,770), blood tests (969) and tests for EPO (817) and human growth hormone (471). The 2008 Olympics implemented the largest drug-testing program in the history of the Olympics.

Six athletes were thrown out for doping violations during the Olympics, and three other cases are still pending.

The most controversial case of doping at Beijing has been Fani Halkia, the Greek hurdler who won the gold at the at the women’s 400m hurdles at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. On August 16 at the Beijing Olympics, Halkia tested positive for the anabolic steroidss methytrienolone.

Tags: anabolic steroids, Athens Olympics, Beijing Olympics, Fani Halkia, International Olympic Committee, methyltrienolone, steroids, WADA

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Greek track athletes Anastasios “Tassos” Gousis and Fani Halkia had presented a case against unnamed individuals who were allegedly responsible for the two athletes’ failed steroid tests.

Gousis told a prosecutor last week that he was unaware that he was given performance-enhancing drugs. He was supposed to compete at the 200 meter-event in Beijing Summer Olympics, but was sent home from a pre-Olympic training camp in Japan because he tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltrienolone (also known as M3) in his A-sample on August 8. The test was conducted by the Greek anti-doping agency.

“Gousis said he didn’t know anything about the supplements he was taking and that no athlete would put his career at risk days before the Olympics,” a court official, who refused to be named, told Reuters.

The 29-year-old sprinter stated that their lives (his and Halkia’s) were put in danger by those individuals who administered the drugs without their knowledge, according top court officials.

Halkia also tested for M3 August 16 during the Beijing Olympics. The Greek hurdler initially denied the she has taken any illicit compounds and requested that her B-sample be tested. The next day her B-sample also tested positive.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has filed a lawsuit against Halkia’s coach, George Panagiotopoulos, who presented himself before prosecutor last week and said she had never deliberately taken performance-enhancing steroids.

Tags: anabolic steroids, Fani Halkia, Greek athletes tested positive for steroids, M3, methyltrienolone, steroid use, steroids, Tassos Gousis

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From AFP:

Over a dozen Greek athletes who failed doping tests prior to and during last month’s Beijing Olympics thought a rare anabolic steroid would help them elude tests, a leading anti-doping expert said Monday.

But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had been on the lookout for cheats from Greece ever since the drug, methyltrienolone, turned up in the results of 11 Greek weightlifters in April, Don Catlin, a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s committee for science and medicine, told Ta Nea daily.

“The Greek case…involved the use of a particularly rare and dangerous anabolic whose use had not been officially recorded before,” Catlin said.

“Whoever marketed it in Greece undoubtedly argued that it is not harmful and could not be traced, as only small quantities are needed for it to act.”

The doping outbreak in the country’s Olympic team already resulted in a judicial inquiry in Greece. It also urged its parliament to enact tougher anti-doping legislation.

Under the new regulations, reward cuts for athletes and harsher penalties against those guilty of supplying banned substances and corrupt anti-doping and sports officials will be imposed.

Fifteen Greek athletes have tested positive for methyltrienolone before and during the Beijing Olympics. Out of the 15 athletes, eleven were from the weightlifting team who tested positive for M3 in an out-of-competition screening in March this year.

The most prominent of these controversial athletes is Fani Halkia, who won the silver in hurdling in Beijing. She was later disqualified and stripped of that medal.

Tags: Fani Halkia, Greek athletes on steroids, International Olympic Committee, methyltrienolone, tougher penalties for steroid users

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We all know how great Greeks are in diverse fields – philosophy, literature, science and arts, to name just a few.  And because of the Greek diaspora, it has been said that many civilizations across the globe had developed because of the influence of the Greeks.

But these days, however, the Greeks have been losing their distinction especially in the world of sports. This is being witnessed in the ongoing Olympics – which is another Greek’s contribution to the world – as members of the Greek team continue to decrease because of use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. The latest ‘casualty’ is runner Fani Halkia, who tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltrienolone. AP reports.

A Greek TV station says Fani Halkia, who won gold in the women’s 400 meters hurdles at the 2004 Athens Olympics, has tested positive for a banned substance.

Skai TV also said Saturday that Halkia has already left the Olympic village.

Another Greek station, Mega Channel, also said an athlete had tested positive for the banned steroid methyltrienolone. But it did not name the athlete.

Halkia was tested a few days before the Beijing Olympics in Japan, where Greece’s track and field team had been training.

Tags: anabolic steroids, Fani Halkia, Greek team, hurdles, methyltrienolone, olympics

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