Russians had better mind pees and cues

ATHLETICS:YESTERDAY EVENING I began the head-wrecking process of packing for Beijing, and after five minutes had practically filled my large Nike sports bag without actually including any clothes, footwear or toiletries. Then I tried to lift it. So much for travelling light.

The problem is that for several weeks now I've been accumulating a range of books I figured would become essential Olympic references. The fact at least half of these are hardbacks doesn't help. Just as well it's going to be hot and steamy out there because the one tee-shirt is going to have to do me.

First into the bag was The Complete Book of the Olympics, 2008 Edition (Aurum).This is the seventh consecutive edition of what has become the definitive record of Olympic history. After that came Faster, Higher, Stronger: A History of Ireland's Olympians (Ashfield). This is the second edition of the brilliantly researched celebration of every man and woman who competed in the Olympics for Ireland, or indeed for another country.

RTÉ take a more contemporary look at the subject in Ireland's Olympians: Beijing and Beyond(Collins).

Athletics 2008: The International Track and Field Annual(Sports Books) has been going since 1984 and become the standard statistical handbook of the sport, hardly surprising given there are 250 contributors, all carefully edited by the former BBC commentator Peter Matthews.

I threw in a couple of other historical books, including The First London Olympics, 1908(Piatkus).

For background material to the whole China experience, I've also started reading China Road (Bloomsbury). I was told this was a terrific account of modern China, and so it is.

All I was missing then were some books about drugs. I'm not that naïve as to think I wouldn't need them. I was still wondering which of them to bring when the news came that seven of Russia's elite women athletes - most of them gold-medal contenders for Beijing - were being suspended for "fraudulent substitution of urine".

So I went straight back to the bookshelf to find Breaking the Chain; Drugs and Cycling, The True Story(Yellow Jersey).

This remains one of the most horrifying accounts of the various practices of doping in sport - none of which are limited to cycling - delightfully disclosed by the former Festina team soigneur Willy Voet. I just thought the practice "fraudulent substitution of urine" was a little outdated, that you'd want to be fairly stupid to be playing that game so close to Beijing.

Voet was the man caught trying to bring industrial amounts of drugs into Dublin for the start of the 1998 Tour de France, thus igniting what became known as the Festina Affair. Chapter six of Breaking the Chain, Tube Up The Bum,is all about this practice of "fraudulent substitution of urine", and you may not want to read this while eating.

"Examples include the 'hidey hole', which I learned somewhere along the way from a fellow Belgian soigneur," writes Voet. "You get a rubber tube, at one end fix a small cork, at the other a condom, running about a third of the way up the tube. As a precaution, you stick carpet pile, or any short hair, on the part of the tube which isn't in the condom.

"When the rider comes to change before going to the drug control, you slip the part of the tube fitted with the condom up the backside, inject clean urine up the tube, cork it, and stick it to the skin, following the line of the perineum, as far as the testicles. That's why the hairs are necessary, to hide the tube in case the doctor running the test decides to lean down.

"The condom is held in the anus, which has the advantage of keeping the urine at body temperature, so the doctor won't be suspicious. This system was never bettered - no doctor suspected a thing and I used it for three years without any worries."

Eventually the testers caught on to this, so the procedure was simply modified.

In the days of designer steroids and recombinant EPO, "fraudulent substitution of urine" seemed so old-fashioned - although the Russians clearly thought otherwise. Rather, it was the method of their champions:

Among those just done for it are Yelena Soboleva, who is fastest in the world this year over 800 and 1,500 metres and set a world record in winning the 1,500 metres at the World Indoor Championships last March; Tatyana Tomashova, the two-time 1,500-metre world champion and Olympic silver medallist from Athens four years ago; Darya Pishchalnikova, the European discus champion; and the former hammer world-record holder Gulfia Khanafeyeva.

Oh, and Olga Yegorova, who tested positive for EPO back in 2001 but escaped on a technicality - prompting Paula Radcliffe to wave a banner that read "EPO cheats out" as Yegorova proceeded to win gold in the 5,000 metres at the World Championships in Edmonton.

No one is certain exactly how the Russians were performing this "fraudulent substitution of urine", but what is certain is that they weren't caught by accident.

This was a considerable coup for the anti-doping programme of the IAAF, an intricate sting operation involving DNA testing and nearly two years of observation.

What triggered it wasn't the suspicion that the Russians were necessarily so dirty, but that they were so clean, so tidily and uniformly negative - or as one IAAF official said "too good to be true". So from March to July of last year, the IAAF began to store out-of-competition tests given to Russian athletes. Those tests were then compared using DNA analysis to tests given during IAAF competitions this year - which revealed the "clean" urine provided to testers in Russia did not belong to the seven athletes.

That their biggest names were caught this way, at the first attempt, has raised fears that doping in Russia may be returning to the widespread systematic regime of the former Soviet Union. Either way, this is clearly a major battle won in the war on drugs.

Another line has been crossed. Now more than ever, the testers are edging one step ahead of the cheaters. Earlier this week the International Olympic Committee announced all drug tests taken in Beijing would be stored for eight years and revisited as new methods of testing were developed. Previously, they were stored for 90 days.

It will be interesting to see how many Olympic medal contenders will suddenly strain a hamstring or develop a head cold. If I were messing around with any dodgy chemicals right now I wouldn't go anywhere near Beijing.

Let them go. Let them run scared. At least now, when it comes to the oldest trick in drug testing, there can be no more taking the p***.