Just seven days until Beijing, and the drug busts have started already

The spectre of drugs tarnished the Olympics again on Thursday night after seven more athletes were banned. Five Russians and two Romanians were provisionally excluded over suspicions of doping in one of the biggest one-day purges in living memory just a week before the Beijing Games begin.

More than 20 athletes have been banned in the build-up to the Games and an improved testing regime threatens to expose more cheats who leave their sports under a cloud of suspicion.

Hopes of a cleaner Olympics than in Athens four years ago are fading fast. The Greek Games produced a record 26 positive doping tests with six medallists, including two gold winners, identified.

Briton Jason Gardener, a relay gold medallist in Athens, says little has changed and cannot believe the blue riband sprint finals in Beijing will be drug free.

He said:'I wish I could watch these Olympics and feel they are clean, but history has taught me I can't. It's a sad fact that whoever wins the 100metres will have a question mark hanging over them.

'The authorities are supposed to be making progress but, in actual fact, the process has gone backwards.'

The Russian cases represent potentially the biggest doping scandal since BALCO in 2003 and appear to have been announced by the IAAF in the hope of being forgotten by the time the athletics begins in Beijing on August 15.

Those suspended last night included Yelena Soboleva, the world leader going into Beijing at both 800 and 1500 metres, close rival Yulia Fomenko and Tatyana Tomashova, who was world 1500m champion in 2003 and 2005 and runner-up to Kelly Holmes at the Athens Olympics.

The others kicked off the team are discus thrower Darya Pishchalnikova, runner-up in last year's world championships, and hammer thrower Gulfiya Khanafeyeva, a former world record holder.

They were trapped, along with two more Russians who did not make the Olympic team, by an 18-month IAAF sting operation which found they were using other people's urine when giving samples to testers.

All have been charged with 'fraudulent substitution of urine' after DNA analysis. They have 14 days to request a hearing.

The IAAF have said they would keep all samples for eight years and re-test when new detection methods were discovered.

Romanian 1500m specialists Elena Antoci and Cristina Vasiloiu make up the seven.
Blood samples they gave showed suspiciously high concentrations of haemoglobin, a possible sign they were using the drug EPO, and they were dropped from the team.
Romania's fastest 1500m runner Liliana Popescu was dropped for a similar reason this month.

A total of 14 prospective Olympic competitors have already dropped out of the Greek team because of doping-related issues and two Israelis and an Italian cyclist have failed drugs tests.

A total of 4,500 tests will be conducted in Beijing, a quarter more than in Athens, with the top five athletes and two random finishers in every event subject to them.