Walk champ tests positive

This is something that I might try to follow a little bit since drug use, or performance enhancers, have been dragging down track and field.

Athanasia Tsoumeleka, the 20-kilometer walk champion at the 2004 Athens Games, tested positive for a banned blood-booster in a retesting of a sample she provided two days before the Beijing Olympics.

Ouch! At this point it doesn't seem that her Athens performance was aided with any illegal substances but the second test reveals that her Beijing performance was indeed. But her positive test was just one of over a dozen for Greek athletes. Somethings seems rotten but what do we really know if we are unable to compare the ratio of positive tests to athletes with each country.

Tsoumeleka's positive test result was the latest affecting Greek athletes.

Fani Halkia, the 2004 Olympic 400-meter hurdles champion, was dropped from the team in Beijing and expelled from the athletes' village after testing positive for an anabolic steroid. Fourteen other Greeks, including 11 weightlifters, tested positive for the same substance before the Olympics.

Wow. Tsoumeleka also announced that she is retiring from competition. I would certainly hate to go out that way.