Far fewer people logged on to official Internet sites to keep track of the Sydney Olympics than expected, senior Olympic officials said.

The International Olympic Committee’s marketing division had forecast that some 35 million individuals, or "unique users", would log on to www.olympics.com and other official Games-related websites before the Sydney Olympics opened on September 15.

But with one day to go before the Games end, the officials said the anticipated figure was closer to 15 million and even that estimate may be on the high side.

"We paid too much attention to the Internet hype," said IOC senior vice president Dick Pound of Canada, the Olympic movement’s marketing chief, when asked why the figure was so far below pre-Games estimates.

IOC marketing director Michael Payne said the estimated figures, equivalent to less than 0.5 percent of the global television audience of 3.7 billion Olympic viewers, showed the Internet still had a long way to go as a mainstream medium.

"The perception out there is that the whole world revolves around it," Payne said. "But as an entertainment vehicle it’s not yet there. TV is still by 99.5 percent the king."

The anticipated number of unique users was seven times higher than the figure during the 1998 Nagano Winter Games and Payne said it would clearly be much higher at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Records were also set for the total number of page hits by the users, estimated at 9.7 billion. The record number of hits in a single day was 874.5 million on September 26, against 634 million hits for the entire period of Nagano’s Games.

But Payne said: "While the Internet has been an unprecedented success in Sydney...people should not confuse the number of hits with how many people are actually logging on."

The time difference between Sydney and Europe and the United States had been expected to prompt huge numbers of people to log on to seek news and results from the Olympics rather than wait for delayed television broadcasts.

The IOC’s contracts with traditional broadcasting rights holders also prevent television networks from using moving images of Olympic competition on websites.

The IOC has retained those rights for itself for the 2002 and 2006 Winter Games and for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Pound said it was not clear what the Olympic movement would do with those rights, but indicated that it would not rapidly change its policy of restricting broadcasting rights to single countries or regions because of the Internet’s global reach.

"I think we have to stick with the format that has got us this far in the Olympic movement - teams, TV rights organised on a territorial basis,” he said.

US broadcasting rights holder NBC has recorded lower than expected viewing figures with its prime-time television package of taped Olympic highlights.

But Pound and Payne said television audiences were up globally and in individual countries such as China, Japan, South Korea and Canada.

PETER WATTS
Sunday Times

DAVID WALSH
Sunday Times

Pospelova: positive test

Russia’s European indoor 400 metres champion Svetlana Pospelova has became the first track-and-field athlete to test positive for a banned substance at these Olympics after failing an out-of-competition drug test for the steroid stanozolol.

However, the test cannot be regarded as a complete positive case until all the details have been discussed and analysed, athletics officials said.

The test was taken a few days after Pospelova failed to reach the second round of the 400 metres eight days ago. The 20-year-old athlete has already left the Games.

"It is for stanozolol but the athlete has left," confirmed Alexandre de Merode, the International Olympic Committee medical commission chief.

Francois Carrard, IOC director-general, said the case would be discussed at a meeting of the IOC’s executive board on Sunday.

The IOC cannot expel the athlete from the Games since she has already left. It is therefore likely that it will pass the case on to the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), the world governing body of track and field.

If the positive test is confirmed Pospelova faces a compulsory two-year ban for a steroid offence under IAAF rules.

Stanozolol was the substance found in the urine of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 when Johnson was subsequently stripped of his men’s 100 metres gold medal.

Asked if he was surprised that athletes were still using the old drug, de Merode said: "I’m not surprised. We can see that, when athletes take something, they sometimes take old well-known drugs."

Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), expressed astonishment that an athlete would take steroids.

"Why they think steroids can’t be tested for, I don’t know," he said.

Pospelova made a big impression this year when she won the European indoor title in Ghent in Belgium in February and the European Cup 400 metres in July, only to disappoint in Sydney.

The case was discussed by the IOC’s medical commission in the early hours of Saturday morning and was on the agenda of a brief IOC executive board meeting around breakfast-time. De Merode said one of the reasons the meeting about the case had been put back until Sunday was that they had so far received no explanation from the Russian.

Under IOC rules a competitor has the right to account for any positive finding.

Pospelova, a member of the St Petersburg club, has improved her best 400m time from 52.58sec to 50.42sec in the last season.

But despite winning the European indoor and Cup titles, she could only clock 53.34sec in her 400m heat on the first day of the athletics programme.

Officials are conducting out out-of-competition tests for the first time at the Sydney Games.

Before the athletics started, Belarus hammer thrower Vadim Devyatovsky was sent home after testing positive for nandrolone in an out-of-competition test in the Olympic village.

Five competitors, none of them from athletics, have tested positive for banned drugs in competition tests carried out during the Olympics although several athletes were banned from the Games for failing out-of-competition tests before the start.

Four of the five - Bulgarian weightlifters Ivan Ivanov, Izabela Dragneva and Sevdalin Minchev and 17-year-old Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan - were stripped of medals. Latvian rower Andris Reinholds failed a test but did not win a medal.

PETER WATTS
Sunday Times

Make sure you write something positive," said one of Sydney's 50,000 volunteers as his eyes scanned the accreditation badge.

Positive? He could not have chosen a better word. In the weeks before and during the Sydney Games, there have been 34 "positives" - each one a reminder of sport's dark trade but also a sliver of light; a hint, a hope that there may be a better future. Athletes have been sent home, stripped of their medals, shorn of their good names. There have been the usual suspects - a Belarussian, a Latvian, a Kazakhstani - but not just them. This time not all of the cheats have come from sport's underclass.

Minutes before competing, the world record-holder in the women's hammer, Mihaela Melinte, was ordered to leave the arena. Having tested positive a month before, the Romanian had no right to be at the Olympics. Then there was the picture of her compatriot, the 16-year-old Andreea Raducan, emerging from a session at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Flanked by two burly Australian policemen, Raducan's sunken eyes and wasted expression showed us what happens when innocence is violently shattered. She said it was two Nurofen. The authorities said: "Sorry, positive."

The International Olympic Committee's conversion to higher standards has come late. Before these Games, their doping policy was designed to protect the image and myth of clean and fair competition. Drugs testing began at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and over the next seven Olympiads, 54,000 drugs tests were taken, with just 52 positives. It was a cosmetic exercise, designed to promote Olympianism as idealism. Rings as halos. It was a scam and it brought Olympic sport to its knees, offering us not real competition but something that just wasn't believable. Cornelia Ender, Marita Koch, Ben Johnson, the late Florence Griffith Joyner, Kristin Otto, Linford Christie, Michelle Smith: hall of fame or hall of shame? The tragedy is that it was allowed to go so far.

In Sydney, a start has been made. Counting the 27 Chinese who were kept at home and other athletes who have failed tests, the number of positives from these Olympics has exceeded the 52 from the previous seven. The end may not be reachable but, at least, the journey has begun.

On its first leg, it picked up the world champion shot-putter, C J Hunter. As big as a Bulgarian weightlifter and at 1,000 times the legal limit for nandrolone, Hunter was no small fly on the gymnasium wall. Rather, he is husband to Marion Jones, the world's greatest female athlete. He was the big fish the authorities wanted. By nailing him, they show the stars are not bullet-proof.

Jones's final act at the Sydney Olympics was a fiercely competitive third leg in the 400m relay and, from there, the US could not lose. It was her third gold medal and even though she left the stage smiling, she could not escape Hunter's shadow. There is no evidence that Jones uses drugs, no denying her extraordinary athleticism, but where once the sheet was pure white, there is now a stain.

This cuts to the Olympics' commercial core; to Jones's and Hunter's sponsor, Nike, and the Games' biggest backer, the US television network, NBC. They paid $700m for the rights and saw Jones as one of the central characters in their story. Before Sydney, it probably would not have happened. Those who paid the piper heard only the sweetest tunes.

Through last week, Jones coped well with the news that her husband had failed four drugs tests but the questions were gentle and the obvious one was not asked. Could a husband dope without his athlete wife knowing about it? "I think it is very, very unlikely," said Werner Reiterer, an Australian discus thrower who recently admitted to three years of doping before pulling out of the Olympics. "When I decided to dope, I told my wife Deborah and both my parents what I was about to do. I felt they would see the physical changes and notice the sharp improvement in my performance. You can't hide that from the people close to you. So rather than have them come to me and ask what I was doing, I told them in advance."

The harder questions for Jones will come if her husband is officially sanctioned. Medals are no longer any protection. Four years ago in Atlanta, the swimmer Michelle Smith left the Olympic pool with three golds but couldn't shake off the suspicion that she had cheated. Last week, the Dutch swimmer Inge de Bruijn left Sydney's magnificent Aquatic Centre with three gold medals but had to answer many drug-related questions.

There was a time when athletes had only to pass inadequate drugs tests to establish their innocence. That is no longer the case. Suspicions once felt but not expressed are now part of the post-race press conference. After Konstantinos Kenteris's surprise win in the men's 200m final, the Greek athlete was asked why he had raced outside his native country so seldom. Athletes who do not compete on the regular circuit, with its routine drug controls, are often suspected.

Later in the same press conference, Britain's Darren Campbell was asked about his relationship with his coach, Linford Christie, and how Christie's positive test had affected his preparation. Campbell began by saying he didn't really want to discuss it, but that Christie had been a huge support to him and he was glad that the coach had decided to come to Sydney.

After offering that show of support for Christie, Campbell then reiterated his reluctance to discuss this subject "because you guys have caused the problem". As Campbell complained, Kenteris's coach Christos Tzekos clapped enthusiastically. Tzekos, a fluent English speaker, wholeheartedly agreed that Christie's problem was not being 100 times over the limit for nandrolone but unsympathetic journalists.

It was a moment of wonderful solidarity between the silver medallist and the coach of the gold medallist. This was their world and it was their entitlement to arrange it and manage it as they saw fit. In this world, positive drugs tests are contaminated nutrients and unexplained mysteries. Doping need not concern you.

It has to concern us. "We have had surveys," says Andrew Pipe, chairman of Canada's Centre for Ethics in Sport, "which show parents are withholding their kids from sports where they believe

doping is a problem. I understand that. I know I don't want my son competing in a sport where to succeed he feels he has to take a sledgehammer to his endocrine system."

With its catalogue of positives, the Sydney Games has given Olympic sport the chance to start again. "What's been happening," says Professor John Hoberman, author of Darwin's Athletes, "is that many of the world's bigger sports bodies have been falling out with each other. The IAAF doesn't trust USA Track and Field, neither does the IOC, and USA Track and Field doesn't trust the IAAF. Previously all these bodies operated within a comfortable arrangement that amounted to very ineffective drug testing. That arrangement has collapsed."

Other factors have played a part. The exposure two years ago of widespread doping at the Tour de France was a reminder to Olympic chiefs of how a great sporting institution could be torn down by doping. Over three weeks in July 1998, French police and customs proved that the most damning assessments of professional cycling were short of the reality.

So, too, the organising committee of the Sydney Games upped the ante and insisted on taking seriously the whole business of drugs testing. When Sergei Voynov, the Uzbekistan coach, arrived in Sydney with 15 vials of growth hormone, he was gambling in the wrong country. Australia insisted upon serious testing in the run-up to the Games and it was those tests that were most effective.

At last, sports bodies are beginning to understand the seriousness of the threat. Some years ago, a medical scientist at the University of Pittsburgh working on a gene therapy to build the strength of patients with muscular dystrophy, was contacted by a sports scientist who wished to apply his technique. Genetic therapies lurk around the next corner. They will build particular muscles, promote growth of blood vessels, boost the body's production of naturally occurring hormones - and can create athletes who are freaks of nature. Professor Bengt Saltin, the world's most eminent exercise physiologist, says the threat of genetic manipulation in sport should be taken very seriously.

Sydney has given us a glimpse of what can be achieved when sport's custodians make an effort. Nothing of consequence will be achieved unless the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) can now lead the fight against doping. In its nine months' existence, WADA has galvanised the anti-doping movement but it has miles to go.

Will it be able to send independent testers into every country in the world? Will it be able to find out where the elite athletes do their pre-season training?

Does the sports world have the stomach for this fight? After winning the women's long jump at these Olympics, the German Heike Drechsler told of a time when she was a young girl in what was then East Germany. She would draw pictures of herself with an Olympic gold medal around her neck. That was the dream but the reality of East German sport was a doping programme that exploited the vulnerability of young girls and endangered their long-term health.

The Berlin Wall fell, and from the rubble came the documentary evidence of the state's systematic doping. Ten years have passed since the discovery of East Germany's evil but the problem has not gone away. The past 12 years have seen a wild escalation in free-enterprise doping and it has been almost as pernicious as that which preceded it.

Sydney has offered the sporting world a starting point. In time, that could be its greatest legacy.

DAVID WALSH
Sunday Times