As the Olympic flame lit the Athens sky on Friday night, the Greek sprinter Kostas Kederis was in the hospital bed he was admitted to in the early hours of Friday. Mystery surrounded the motorcycle crash which was said to have put him there and his failure to take a drug test, which will be the subject of an Interna-tional Olympic Committee (IOC) disciplinary hearing tomorrow.
Whatever the decision that panel comes to, the shadow cast over the 28th Olympiad by Kederis and his training partner, Ekaterini Thanou, is vast.
Kederis, the reigning Olympic 200m champion, and Thanou, the women's 100m silver medalist from the 2000 Olympics, were due to be released from hospital yesterday, and they will have emerged to find their reputations, not to mention their participation in the games, on the line.
After a day of frantic developments in the Greek capital, it emerged that an IOC anti-doping team had tried to test Kederis and Thanou in Chicago earlier this week, but they were not at the address which they had given to officials.
If found guilty of the IOC's charge of twice "refusing or failing without justification to provide a sample," they face immediate expulsion from the Games and a possible two-year ban from the sport.
Before addressing the IOC, however, they will face questions from a disillusioned Greek public over the motorcycle crash that followed their failure to submit to a drug test at the Olympic village.
Shortly after the sprinters arrived in the village on Thursday, they were informed that they were required to take a random drug test. Subsequently testers could not find them in their rooms.
The Greek Olympic team suggested at first that the sprinters had gone home to pick up some belongings and later that they had been needed along the route of the Olympic torch relay. The first precise news of their whereabouts came in the early hours of Friday when it was announced they had been admitted to hospital after a road accident.
Kederis and Thanou, who both emerged from obscurity to grab medals in Sydney, have long been suspected of avoiding drug testing, and on Friday night few in Athens seemed willing to accept their version of events at face value.
According to Christos Tsekos, the sprinters' controversial coach who has been implicated in the Balco drug scandal sweeping US athletics, Kederis and Thanou had been with him at his home in Athens when the drug testers called at the athletes' village.
"They had their cell phones turned off and didn't know they were being sought," Tsekos said on Friday.
"They were with me, they took the bike to get there [the village] quickly and as you can see, frustration is the worst thing," he said.
Tsekos said Kederis lost control of the motorbike after slipping on a patch of oil near his house. They arrived at a hospital 24km away, rather than a much closer hospital in Glyfada, but how they got there remains unclear.
There were no records of any police emergency calls being logged in Glyfada on Thursday night, and the ambulance service confirmed it had not answered a call from Kederis or Thanou.
Greek media on Friday night reported that a passing motorist had driven the pair to the hospital but no one came forward to prove that theory.
It was unclear whether Tsekos had taken them to the hospital, and the whereabouts of the motorcycle is unknown.
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