LONDON, Nov 25: International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge has said that those who hope for a 100 per cent drug-free Olympic Games were “naive” and that cheating was part and parcel of human nature.

“I think one has to be realistic,” Rogge said in an interview with the BBC’s Inside Sport programme. “Drug-free sport in general is Utopia. It will be naive to believe that no-one will take drugs.

“There are about 400 million people practising sport on this globe, there are not 400 million saints on earth. Cheating is embedded in human nature and doping is to sport what criminality is to society.

“You will always need cops and judges and prisons and jails and rules and regulations,” he added.

Rogge was speaking ahead of re-testing procedures from samples taken at the Beijing Olympics and he has already said that he expects further positive doping cases to emerge from these.

“We are going to re-test all the blood samples from Beijing,” stated Rogge. “About 980 blood samples will be tested for erythropoietin [Cera], the new EPO test, but also insulin.

“So we are starting this re-testing, it will last a couple of weeks, so we’ll see what comes out of it.”

All the samples currently held will be available for testing by any new techniques that emerge between now and the 2016 Games.

“We are keeping the samples for eight years and we are going to re-test them,” he said. “And ultimately the judgement on the Beijing Games will be given in eight years’ time, because each time a new scientific test is coming up we are going to re-test.”—AFP