Ten out of the 11 athletes on Greece's national weightlifting team accused of using illegal performance enhancing substances on Friday submitted a memorandum through their lawyer Babis Lykoudis in which they denied the charges, according to Athens News Agency.
The athletes had been summoned to testify before First-instance court public prosecutor Andreas Karaflos on Friday after they tested positive for banned substances in a doping test.
The 11th member of the national team that tested positive, a 25-year-old female athlete, has adopted a different stance to her teammates and is being represented separately by another lawyer, Alexis Kougias, who asked for additional evidence from the case file and was granted an extension in order to incorporate this in the testimony his client will submit.
Kougias stressed that this additional evidence included the expert opinion of a sports medicine specialist, who described one of the substances detected in the samples supplied by the athletes as extremely dangerous for their health.
According to Kougias, this new evidence "puts a different criminal angle on the case" since the substances taken were life-threatening.
(Xinhua News Agency May 3, 2008)