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By Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 17, 2000
All Romanian lifters expelled from Games
SYDNEY, Australia -- The Romanian weightlifting team was thrown out of the Olympics on Saturday after two lifters failed drug tests.
International Olympic Committee director general Francois Carrard said the expulsion was ordered by the International Weightlifting Federation.
Under federation rules, any nation is suspended from competition for the rest of that year if three or more of its weightlifters test positive for banned drugs. A third Romanian tested positive earlier this year.
Carrard also said that pre-Games tests by the World Anti-Doping Agency recorded 20 suspected positives. Those tests were reported before and only one of the athletes has been formally identified.
At least two of the suspected positive tests were detected in the athletes village, Carrard said.
The IOC is carrying out its own drug testing in Sydney apart from those of the sports federations. Carrard said no positive results have been recorded so far.
Romanians Traian Ciharean, a bronze medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and Adrian Mateias failed dope tests administered to all 257 Olympic weightlifters. They were expelled from their team.
According to the international federation, weightlifting is the only sport in which all athletes were tested for drugs before the Games.
The Romanian federation last year began automatically banning for life any lifter who fails a drug test.
BEACH VOLLEYBALL: Juan Ibarra and Joel Sotelo of Mexico pulled off the first major upset of the competition by outlasting the top-seeded Australian team of Julien Prosser and Lee Zahner 15-12.
The victory was the first in four matches for the Mexican pair over the Australians, and it advanced the last-seeded team into the final 16. Prosser and Zahner were sent to the loser's bracket.
FENCING: Pavel Kolobkov of Russia finished off a day of upsets to take an individual gold medal in the epee. Kolobkov defeated 1998 world champion Hugues Obry of France 15-12 in the title match. Kolobkov was a silver medalist in the team event for Russia at the 1996 Olympics.
Early in the day, Eric Srecki of France, the 1997 world champion and 1992 Olympic champion, lost.
JUDO: Ryoko Tamura, four times a world titlist, finally won an Olympic gold in the women's 48kg, defeating Lioubov Brouletova of Russia in the championship match.
ROWING: Four years after narrowly missing gold and then donating a kidney to her brother, Missy Ryan is finding the rowing world to be a much faster place.
She and Karen Kraft gave up their oars after winning silver medals in Atlanta. Two months later, Ryan went through the kidney transplant surgery, making a comeback even less likely.
But the pair reunited last year, and in their Olympic return, the American tandem finished an encouraging second to gold-medal favorite Romania in a women's coxless four qualifying heat.
SHOOTING: Tao Luna of China started strong and carried that strength through to win the women's 10-meter air pistol.
Michael Diamond of Australia won the Olympic gold medal in the men's trap with a score of 147.
WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL: Nineteen-year-old Logan Tom stole the show from her older American teammates in her Olympic debut, helping the United States upset China 3-1 in a first-round match.
WOMEN'S WATER POLO: The United States beat reigning World Cup champions the Netherlands 6-4 with Ericka Lorenz scoring two goals. The United States led 3-0, but Netherlands came back to tie before goals by Maureen O'Toole, Lorenz and Robin Beauregard clinched the victory.
WEIGHTLIFTING: Halil Mutlu of Turkey, undefeated and virtually unchallenged since 1995, repeated as champion, breaking his world records in the snatch, clean and jerk and total lift to beat the rest of the field by 27 1/2 pounds, or nearly one-quarter of his 123-pound weight.