Cleaners to inform on Olympic drug cheats

Olympic drug cheats at next summer's London Games should be wary of the cleaners – who'll be keeping an eye on competitors looking to artificially enhance their chances.

The organizers say they will be educating cleaners and security staff on how to inform on doping cheats, by spotting suspicious behaviors or materials.

According to the BBC, a record 5,000 tests for performance enhancing drugs will be carried out at the London Olympics.

Jonathan Harris, who's in charge of anti-doping at the London Olympics organizing committee, said there would be targeted testing based on the intelligence received.

There will be intelligence sources coming from security and from cleaning for example. These are functional areas that have been involved in anti-doping in previous games.

We will be educating those personnel in those functional areas so that if they should come across behaviors that are untoward they share that information with us.

The BBC reported that, at past Olympics, there have been several instances of cleaning staff coming across materials that may have been evidence of doping.

At the winter games in Salt Lake City in 2002, cleaners found blood transfusion equipment in the rubbish of a house rented by the Austrian ski team – several members of the team were subsequently banned.

Britain's biggest drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline, will be providing an anti-doping laboratory that will be run by King's College London, reported Bloomberg.

Athletes are reportedly banned by the International Olympic Committee from possessing syringes and other medical equipment unless they have a valid a medical reason.