Probe proceeds into bike ‘accident’
Adding to the troubles of Greece’s two disgraced top sprinters, police yesterday completed a series of interviews with witnesses regarding last week’s mysterious motorcycle crash which ensured that Costas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou were finally unable to take a drug test they had been avoiding for hours. All testimonies are to be forwarded within the next few days to Athens prosecutor Dimitris Papangelopoulos, who ordered an investigation into the alleged accident. The documents will include a report by forensic specialist Filippos Koutsaftis, whom Papangelopoulos instructed to examine the two athletes at the KAT hospital where they were taken early on Friday morning, the day of the Games opening ceremony. Sources close to the investigation said that Koutsaftis was only able to find slight scratches on Kenteris’s leg and elbow – and no sign of the head injuries mentioned by KAT doctors – while Thanou bore no external lacerations. On the strength of KAT certificates attesting that the two were too badly hurt to appear before an International Olympic Committee disciplinary committee, Thanou and Kenteris were given until yesterday to explain to the IOC their failure to appear for a doping test on Thursday evening. Yesterday, traffic police held a third interview with a 60-year-old Glyfada man who claims to have seen the two sprinters lying injured on the road. But the witness is understood to have not seen how the mystery accident occurred. Kenteris and Thanou claim to have borrowed their coach’s motorbike to get from his house to the Olympic village, and to have crashed on the way.
