Category — Drugs

Former pole vault world champion Giuseppe Gibilisco of Italy is looking forward to the Beijing Olympic Games after his two-year suspension was rescinded last Friday, May 9.

He was banned by the Italian Athletics Federation last July for “having contact with” Italian doctor Carlo Santuccione, who has been linked to doping and is alleged to have provided illegal drugs to athletes. The Commission on Arbitration for Sports overturned this ban following an appeal by Gibilisco.

PHOTO SOURCE: AFP/Getty Images

The list of Olympic dopers keeps on getting longer.

From the New York Times:

A government witness list filed Friday publicly identified Antonio Pettigrew, winner of a gold medal in the 4×400-meter relay at the 2000 Olympics, as a user of banned performance-enhancing drugs.

Pettigrew, a four-time world champion from 1991 to 2001, was among eight athletes on the witness list for the coming trial of the track coach Trevor Graham, who is accused of lying to federal agents. Graham’s trial is to begin May 19.

Read the rest of the article.

Argh. Drugs. Bad news for weightlifting and the Olympic movement in general. Bad news for the Greek Olympic team in particular.

A DPA Report: A second doping test on a group of 11 Greek weightlifters who initially tested positive for banned substances was also found to be positive, making the athletes unlikely competitors for the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, reports said Friday.

The second test was conducted in a laboratory in Cologne, Germany and confirmed results first announced on April 4, which found almost the entire men’s and women’s national teams to have failed tests conducted by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Read the rest here. The sad thing about positive doping reports like this is that they no longer have shock value. Reports about use of banned drugs by athletes have become staple in the daily news so we, members of the public, shrug our shoulders and say, “Huh, what else is new?” Sad.

This is just sad. Someone needs to help this guy. He’s American but if his free fall continues, he might end up like former Nigerian star athletes who, according to Olusuji Fasuba, end up begging in the streets.

Associated Press: Former track star Tim Montgomery has been indicted on heroin distribution charges, the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk reported Thursday.

The 33-year-old sprinter was arrested Wednesday on a sealed indictment, accused of dealing more than 100 grams of heroin in Virginia over the past year, according to the newspaper.

Montgomery was being held at the Portsmouth city jail, said Karin Johnson, public information officer for the Portsmouth sheriff’s office. She said U.S. marshals brought him in Wednesday night.

Montgomery told the newspaper he knew nothing of the accusations and that his arrest was a “total surprise.”

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Because he will sue you and you’ll end up paying him. From Reuters:

Olympic gold-medal-winning snowboarder Ross Rebagliati has settled a lawsuit over a television series that he had accused of defaming him.

The Canadian snowboarder reached the out-of-court settlement with CTV Television network and producers of the series, “Whistler,” according a statement released by his spokesman on Friday. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

What was the lawsuit about?

Rebagliati said he was defamed by a character in the syndicated series named Beck MacKaye, who was portrayed as a former Olympic snowboarder and resident at the Whistler, British Columbia, ski resort whose death was linked to alcoholism, womanizing and blackmail.

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