The Dopers of Turin

The Winter Games get started today, and already there is a doping scandal:

Doping threatened to taint the opening of the Winter Olympics on Friday as athletes and dignitaries prepared for an inaugural ceremony launching two weeks of sport.

An Italian official said several Winter Olympics athletes had tested positive for doping in pre-Games drugs checks, but the International Olympic Committee rejected his statement.

In an apparent separate development that enraged the German team, eight Nordic skiers were suspended for five days for high red cell counts. But officials said the bans were a health measure, not a doping-related sanction.

Giovanni Zotta, who is an Italian representative on the IOC's anti-doping commission, said preliminary tests by the IOC on 98 athletes had found the banned substance Erythropoietin (EPO) in several athletes.

There will be a lot of this kind of stuff before these games end.