D-Day for accused Olympic athletes
Friday is D-Day for two Australian Olympic athletes accused of drug offences.
Weightlifter Caroline Pileggi will learn whether her appeal against being dumped from the Athens Games is successful, and cyclist Jobie Dajka is expecting to learn the outcome of police investigations into him.
Accused cyclist Sean Eadie, meanwhile, will have a nervous weekend.
His appeal against a drugs infraction notice for allegedly importing banned human growth hormones will be heard in the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Sydney on Monday evening.
Pileggi, who was to have been Australia's first Olympic female weightlifter, was dropped from the Athens team after refusing a drugs test in Fiji in June.
But she told the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Melbourne that she fled from two drug testing officials in Sigatoka, Fiji, because she did not know who they were.
"I didn't feel safe," she told the tribunal.
One of the New Zealand testing officials, acting on behalf of the Australian Sports Drug Agency (ASDA), later admitted that he was not familiar with the regulations and had not correctly identified himself at their first meeting.
He also said he had not followed the correct procedure for signing the form.
"The circumstances were less than ideal," Vaughan Jones told senior Tribunal member Narelle Bell.
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