IOC chairman Rogge's personal distaste for Greek sprinter threatens to tarnish Games

An Olympic Games website from Australia (beijing2008.net.au) is calling on IOC Chairman Jaques Rogge to exercise calm and sound judgement when handling the situation of Greek sprinter Katerina Thanaou.

Thannaou was one of the two Greek Athletes who invented a motorcycle athlete on the eve of the 2004 Games in Athens, allegedly to evade detection in a drug test. Citing the accident, Thannou withdrew from the 2004 Olympics, making her impervious to the IOC's authority.

This week, Greece named her in their 2008 Olympic team, a announcement which  caused Rogge to make the unusual  move of intervening to dispute Thanou's Olympic accreditation.

At the time of the dubious accident, Thanou and her sprinter partner Kostas Kenteris turned up in Athens to simply surrender their Olympic accreditation, which meant the IOC no longer had jurisdiction over the case.

However, the IOC did issue a press release which stated "that any participation of Kenteris and Thanou... at any further edition of the Olympic Games shall be subject to a new procedure in front of the IOC".

With Thanou this week being placed on the Greek team, and thereby tacitly receiving support from the Greek government, the IOC and Rogge are in a difficult position.

If Rogge decides outright to ban Thanou in this unprecedented situation, he risks censure for abusing his powers as Olympic boss. There is of course the importance of conveying the IOC's increasingly outdated zero-tolerance policy of performancing enhancing drug use, but at an Olympics where human rights, due process and civil liberties are in such a sharp and snug spotlight, Rogge must ensure that he does not let his own obvious animosity towards Thanou portray the IOC as just another tyrant at a convention of the world's worst human rights violators.