Athletics: Greece's turn to feel the chill wind of doubt

Munich 2002: Kenteris in the spotlight as rumours inevitably follow startling run

It was another night, another round of Chinese whispers in the corridors of Munich's Olympiastadion. Kelly Holmes had long gone, the aspersions cast towards Jolanda Ceplak backtracked and very nearly forgotten.

An air of fresh intrigue and suspicion was pervading the press-conference room where 24 hours earlier an impassioned Ceplak had told her inquisitors that her burgeoning success as an 800m runner was due solely to "training so hard it leaves me in tears sometimes".

In one corner a group of Greek journalists were cheering and backslapping Kostas Kenteris, the air-force sergeant who had flown like Greece lightning to the men's 200m title on the fourth day of the European Championships. Right next to them was a knot of compatriots and colleagues berating Kim Gevaert and Manuela Levorato, the second and third-placed runners in the women's 200m final on Friday evening.

The Greek press had taken great exception to the comments of the Belgian Gevaert, and her quoting of the Italian Levorato, in the aftermath of the women's 100m final.

Both had finished behind the Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou in that race and Gevaert had told the Belgian press: "The Italian girl came up to me after the race and said, 'For me, you are the European champion'. I cannot help thinking the gold medal should be mine. I don't think Thanou is clean. She's always hiding."

From what or whom Thanou might have been hiding was not made clear. It has been noted with a raising of eyebrows in Munich, though, that Thanou and Kenteris have emerged to beat the best of the continent without having set foot outside their country on the European circuit this summer.

It will be noted with even greater interest that all but a handful of the Greek athletes entered for the Athens Grand Prix in June were withdrawn overnight from the provisional start lists when a drug- testing team sent by the International Association of Athletics Federations arrived unannounced at the meeting hotel.

Thanou and Kenteris were two of the notable absentees from the track in the Olympic Stadium the following day. Both are coached by Hristos Tzekos, a sprint guru who gained some renown five years ago for employing strong-arm tactics to prevent four of his athletes being tested for drugs. The athletes were liable to a four-year suspension for avoiding a test, though the Hellenic Amateur Athletic Association chose only to reprimand their coach.

A week after the incident one of the sprinters involved, Haralabros Papadias, emerged from obscurity to win the world indoor 60m title in Paris. Seven months earlier he had failed to venture beyond the first round of the 100m at the Atlanta Olympics. It was not the last surprise sprung on the sprinting world by a member of the Tzekos stable.

Two years ago, when Kenteris took the Olympic 200m crown ahead of Darren Campbell in Stadium Australia, a headline in the next day's Sydney Morning Herald asked: "Who the Hellas is Kostas Kenteris?"

It was a valid question. More that 2,500 athletes were listed in the 2000 edition of Who's Who In World Athletics. Kenteris was not one of them. The first male Greek runner to strike Olympic gold since Spiridon Louis won the marathon in 1896 had finished fifth and last behind the victorious Christian Malcolm at the European Indoor Championships in Ghent in February 2000. It came to light in Sydney that he had subsequently come under the coaching wing of Tzekos.

In Munich on Friday night the 29-year-old Kenteris became the first male 200m runner in history to complete a hat-trick of Olympic, world and European titles. He did so by breaking through the 20-second barrier for the first time. His 19.85sec stands second on the European all-time list to the 19.72 that the Italian Pietro Mennea clocked at high altitude in Mexico City in 1979.

The trouble is that Kenteris is unlikely to be seen scorching around the tracks of Europe in the weeks ahead. "I have to talk to my coach about where to run and when," he said at his post-race press conference. "I have come from Athens, where it is 55 degrees, to here, where it is 10 degrees. It has given me a back problem."

Francis Obikwelu and Marlon Devonish, sitting either side of Europe's fastest 200m man, both looked a little bemused. They had, after all, just spent 20 seconds watching the Greek's back disappear into the distance. The rest of us were left wondering just how Kenteris had done it: how, with only two competitive races on home soil this summer, he had run so fast and won by a margin of 0.36sec, a street in sprinting terms.

It was ever thus, though, in the wondrous world of track and field. It was in the Olympiastadion 30 years ago that Lasse Viren was asked how he had emerged from the shadows to achieve his Olympic 5,000m and 10,000m double.

"By drinking reindeer milk," he famously replied.