Greece gets a gold medal: in doping!

This news leaves little to the imagination and hardly needs any explanations:

Greece only received one gold medal in doping, as 15 athletes were not allowed to participate at the Olympic Games in Beijing, which ended today.

“You had won the gold medal in the doping discipline- terrible but true” said the President of the International Olympic Committee Jacques Rogge during the meting with the president of the Greek Olympic Committee Minos Kyriakou. [Source]

Rogge said that Greece have to start investigating the doping scandal immediately.

So, what do “we” have to say to the International Community? That we were being “targetted”. That our athletes were being tested more often. And that maybe, even, the test results were faked. As if the WADA has anything to gain by doing that.

It is in fact the Greek anti-doping mechanisms that prove to be inadequate, both by inadequate testing and by not punishing offenders.

It was in 2005 when Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou were acquitted of doping charges in the Athens 2004 Olympics, when the whole world knew they were doped-up. A year later, they confessed at IAAF, but they could not be charged again in Greece, so they were given a “get out of jail free” card.

In contrast, in the U.S., worldwide star sprinter Marion Jones received a 6-month jail sentence and was stripped of all five of her Olympic medals.

So, if the athletes and their coaches thrive on the state’s inability to check and punish bad players, isn’t it also the state’s fault for encouraging this kind of behaviour?

Censorship on state TV

Stelios Kouloglou is a major league reporter.

He’s one of these guys that fights for the things he believes in. He fights to get his message across to the people, and not to turn his viewership figures into expensive cars. He’s one of the good guys.

In May, the state-run TV network, ERT, announced that they would not be renewing his contract for the next season, despite the fact that his investigative reports are the ones that bring in more viewers than all others on the state network.

And we wonder…

Is it because Kouloglou highlighted President Putin’s links to the mafia and his shady political tactics the same week that our PM had a meeting with Putin? [1]

Is because the Chinese were upset with the upcoming episode that showed what China was like on the year that they were organising the Olympics?

Or was it because his upcoming reportage on G700 (the 700-euro generation) would show to the world how the government has failed the young educated people looking for work only to get a salary of 700 euros per month.

For the record, Kouloglou is now setting up an Internet TV channel [2] for his “Reportage Without Frontiers” [3] although realistically the commercial viability of such a project is a pretty slim.