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Weightlifter stripped of medal
Athens - Greece's weightlifting bronze-medal winner Leonidas Sampanis was stripped of his bronze medal and thrown out of the Olympics after testing positive for a banned drug, announced the IOC on Sunday.
Sampanis, 33, had won the first medal of the Games for host nation Greece in the 62kg competition but the tests revealed double the permitted amount of testoserone in his system.
His expulsion from the Games is a bitter blow for the host nation still reeling over the doping scandal surrounding sprint stars Kostadinos Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou.
Weightlifting has been Greece's biggest Olympic medal supplier since the 1992 Barcelona Games and has been dubbed by the press here as the country's "dream team".
Sampanis and the Greek team's coach Christos Iacovou testified before an IOC disciplinary panel Saturday, claiming the athlete was innocent.
"I want to declare to the Greek people that I swear to God, to my two little angels, my children, that I never took any such substances," Sampanis told reporters after the IOC hearing.
"I want you to believe me, I don't want you to desert me," he said in an emotional statement made outside the Olympic weightlifting venue.
The IOC's disciplinary commission was unmoved and the executive board expelled him from the Games Sunday.
So far 1 500 doping tests out of the expected 3,000 have been carried out at the Athens Games.
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