Beijing's top Olympics official conceded yesterday that China would have a tough time retaining its fourth place in the medals table achieved at Atlanta and Barcelona, after dropping 27 athletes from its 311-strong team amid allegations of dope-taking.

The decision is a public disgrace for China's mercurial coach, Ma Junren, whose "Ma Family Army" of runners shattered several world records during the 1990s. Ma and six of his runners were among the athletes dropped from the Chinese Olympic team.

"There are multiple reasons for Ma and his runners' disqualification," said He Huixian, spokeswoman for the Chinese Olympic Committee (COC), in a comment candid by the standards of Chinese officials. "Some of them are dropped due to suspicious blood test results."

Tu Mingde, secretary general of the COC, which has been insisting that it is serious about cleaning up sport in China, gave the reasons yesterday why "several of our athletes will not attend to the Sydney Olympic Games."

"The first is that in the course of conducting blood tests we found suspicious results in several athletes. Second, some athletes sustained injuries in training and can't reach their normal levels. Third, a few athletes are not well - they have fallen ill. We decided they should not go in order to protect their health."

The outcome, he said, was that "it won't be very easy to maintain fourth place this time."

John Coates, head of the Australian Olympic Committee, said in Sydney that China had told the Sydney Games organising committee that 27 athletes were axed because of high red blood cell counts. They comprised seven rowers, four swimmers, 14 track and field athletes and two canoeists.

An unusually high concentration of red blood cells sometimes indicates use of the banned drug EPO, which boosts endurance by allowing the blood to carry more oxygen.

The Chinese media broke its silence on the scandal yesterday when the official news agency Xinhua published comments from the spokeswoman for the COC. The spokeswoman said that leaving out the athletes who had "suspicious blood tests" showed China's persistent position and strong will to fight against doping.

"Since 1998, China has introduced out-of-competition blood tests on the athletes and kept intensifying efforts in combating doping," she said. The COC conducted 317 out-of-competition blood tests in 1999 on athletes from seven sports and found six samples were above normal level. In the first half of 2000, the COC conducted 167 blood tests and one was above normal level.

"For the purpose of their health and to protect the principles of fair competition, all these athletes were disqualified from competitions," Ms He said.

She also welcomed the decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to check EPO in the coming Sydney Olympic Games with both blood and urine tests. "It is really a breakthrough for the world in combating against doping for EPO is cancer in the sports world. The COC resolutely supports the IOC's stand," she said.

Ma Junren, until this week a sporting hero in China for his athletes stunning performances, abruptly abandoned his high-altitude camp on the Tibetan plateau on Sunday. The original "Ma Family Army" of runners from the north-eastern province of Liaoning shocked the world in 1993 by sweeping all three medals in the 5,000 metres and taking gold and silver in the 10,000 metres at the Stuttgart world championships. A month later, they broke three world records at the Chinese national championships, where Wang Junxia beat the 10,000 metres world record by 42 seconds, and the 3,000 metres by 16.5 seconds.

Ma vigorously denied allegations that his athletes' astonishing successes could be attributed to banned drugs, and attributed their achievements to high altitude training and traditional tonics of turtle's blood and caterpillar fungus.

However, the writing was on the wall for individual Chinese trainers providing performance-enhancing drugs to their proteges. China is clearly determined to avoid the embarrassments of recent international events when its sports representatives were caught red-handed, especially now that Beijing is making an all-out bid for the 2008 Olympics.

More than 30 Chinese swimmers were found to be using drugs in the last decade, including seven at the 1994 Asian Games in Beijing. One swimmer, Yuan Yuan, was apprehended with 13 vials of human growth hormone, a steroid, in her luggage at the 1998 world swimming championships in Perth, Australia, and four other Chinese women tested positive. Two months ago, another female swimmer, Wu Yanyan, the world champion in the 200-meter individual medley, failed a drug test at the Chinese national championships and was banned for four years.