British drugs testers: 'We will catch cheats'

Drug cheats heading to next month’s Beijing Olympics have been warned by Britain’s top testing team that “if some idiot takes drugs, we will catch them”.

Professor David Cowan, director of the Drug Control Centre at King’s College London, said he was optimistic the Games would be clean but knew there would be challenges.

Professor Cowan will be travelling to Beijing to help the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accredited laboratory during the event.

He was also a member of the International Olympic Committee’s Medical Commission at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and a consultant to the laboratory at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games.

Andy Parkinson, the new acting director of Drug-Free Sport at UK Sport, hopes sports stars would heed warnings that science was catching up with the technology they use and there was also a high price to pay if they got caught.

“I think that I would be naive to think that there may not be a positive test in Beijing but I would hope it would not be a British athlete,” he said.

“I think that athletes are aware that if they get caught at the finish line they will be named in the press and it will probably be the end of their careers.

“We cannot guarantee that no one is going to take a short-cut but what we can guarantee is that for anyone who does cheat and gets caught there will be serious consequences.”

Prof Cowan and Parkinson were speaking at the centre where more than 7,500 samples from UK sports starts are tested for banned substances each year.

This year that figure includes about 1,500 tests being carried out on every British athlete heading to the Olympics and Paralympics.

It is one of only 33 WADA-accredited laboratories which can carry out drug testing in sport.