A titanic battle to claim the title of the world’s strongest woman was overshadowed here today by a saga so sordid and involved that it seemed in turns incredible and comic. Meiyuan Ding, from China, broke the world record as she lifted the equivalent of six Cathy Freemans on her way to winning the gold medal in the +75kg class. By the time she hurried from the Sydney Convention Centre, though, it was buzzing with stories of globetrotting Bulgarians, Qataris with diarrhoea and “a darkish gentleman” competing for the Italy basketball team.

The afternoon had started in quiet and awed contemplation of a group of women any one of whom would have put the Amazons to flight with a dirty look. An American teenager, who her coaches matter-of-factly call ’Fun’ as if it was the most ordinary Christian name in the world, was the main attraction even though this first appearance of female weightlifters at an Olympic Games was crowned by the struggle between Ding and a lugubrious Pole called Agata Wrobel.

By the time Fun - otherwise known as Cheryl Haworth, a part-time fine arts student - had won the bronze medal and Wrobel, red-eyed and snivelling, had wept her way through the podium ceremony, things had started to unravel. A press release was passed around the auditorium - which, by the way, looked more suited to orchestral concerts than this rather strange spectacle - announcing that the International Weightlifting Federation had expelled the entire Bulgarian weightlifting contingent from the Games.

This most supine of bodies had been forced to take action after two more Bulgarian lifters were stripped of their medals after they had been caught taking banned substances, in their case a diuretic called furosemide which helps in the weight shedding process and acts as a masking agent for anabolic steroids. One of them was Izabela Dragneva, the gold medallist in the 48kg event and the mother of a six year old child. They were added to Ivan Ivanov, a silver medallist in the men’s 56kg category, who was also stripped of his medal.

After Fun, Ding and Wrobel - who will never, ever be nicknamed Fun - had given their podium press conference, the IWF promptly held one of their own on the same stage. Their general secretary, a slightly sinister Hungarian called Dr Tamas Ajan, rejected repeated suggestions that weightlifting had now become so discredited as a sport that it would be dropped by the Olympic movement before the 2004 Games in Athens. He said swimming and cycling had worse problems but that there was no question the Bulgarians would be banished.

”This is the Olympic Games,” Dr Ajan said, “and sometimes you have to say that what you cannot accept, you have to stop immediately. You could ask me ’what about the money’ and it is true that we allowed the Romanian team back into the Games after they paid a fine of $50,000 but this is different. The Romanian failed their tests out-of-competition. These actually happened at the Games. The IWF will not tolerate any infraction under any circumstances.”

As Dr Ajan was speaking, the situation began to degenerate into utter farce. It has been common knowledge for some time that Qatar paid Bulgaria, a country which is to weightlifting what Brazil is to football - $1 million to buy seven of its lifters last year. To make it all above-board and bestow a kind of Cat Stevens sheen on it all, the Qataris even game them Arabic names to put the seal on their new nationality. Thus, Valentin Sarov became Nasser Sarouf Fadel, Petar Tanev became Saleem Nayef Badr and Andrey Ivanov became Sulyan Abbas Nader.

Just when we thought the Bulgarians still effectively had a weightlifting team in the Games after all, an Australian Olympic official walked into the press centre grinning broadly. He brought a missive from the President of the Qatar Weightlifting Federation, Mohamed Yousef A Al-Mana. The Qatar team, it appeared, had strayed outside the Olympic Village the night before and had been cooked Arabian food. It had disagreed with them and they had been suffering so badly from diarrhoea all day that they would not be able to compete later in the evening. Co-incidence, that.

The whole thing was starting to reek as foully as a Bulgarian bowel movement but the IWF’s vice-president, Sam Coffa, finished things off with aplomb when he was asked about the practice of buying another country’s athletes. “Now you are entering into the professional and commercial areas of sport,” he said. “I saw a rather darkish gentleman playing basketball for Italy the other night and I am sure he is not Italian. If it’s a concern, so what. This is the modern world.”

Sam Coffa got one thing right, and only one. This is the modern world and a freak-show of a sport as bent and drug-addled as weightlifting has no place in a modern Olympics. Synchronised swimming could make a better claim. Get rid of it and stick it in a circus tent somewhere.

Oliver Holt
The Times