By John Mehaffey
London - Untroubled access to elite Russian track and field athletes for unannounced random dope tests triggered suspicions among the testers that all might not be as it seemed.
The athletes were always ready for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) anti-doping officials and always provided clean urine samples.
"There were no 'no shows'," one official told Reuters. "The Russians were always there."
Suspecting that the results were too good to be true, the IAAF started storing Russian dope samples taken during competition throughout the 2007 season.
The upshot was a meticulous sting operation this year, after which seven Russian women were informed that the urine they had supplied was clearly not theirs because the DNA did not match that in the stored samples.
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Five of them, including the world number one 800 and 1 500 metres runner Yelena Soboleva, had been bound for the Beijing Olympics.
A clear victory for the testers over the cheats, 20 years after the Ben Johnson doping scandal had revealed the extent of illicit doping in the central sport of the summer Olympics, was rightly trumpeted.
Then followed news after the Beijing Games that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would re-test blood samples for a new-generation erythropoietin (EPO) product known as CERA.
Developed to produce EPO, which increases the number of red oxygen-carrying blood cells, CERA's advantage for unscrupulous athletes was to reduce the need for regular injections.
Fortunately the manufacturers, realising the dangers, contacted the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). A test was hastily devised and four Tour de France riders - Italians Leonardo Piepoli and Riccardo Ricco, German Stefan Schumacher and Austrian Bernhard Kohl - were caught when their samples were retested.
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