Consider:

Since 1998, when the first stories broke about the scandals involved in picking Olympic cities, the IOC has been desperately looking to clean up its image. It instituted some internal reforms and put a lot of money into the 2000 Sydney Games.

The success of the Games, the IOC knows, largely depends on stories of success and achievement, of overcoming obstacles and setting records. It helps when those athletes are from the home country--like Australian super-swimmer Ian "Thorpedo" Thorpe--or America, where the big bucks come from. So far this Olympics has not disappointed, with swimming records galore and exciting new teams like the U.S. men's soccer squad.

Behind the shine, however, I hardly find it surprising to see more and more scandal. For a while now, the anti-doping movement has been picking up speed, to the point where there is even a vigilant independent organization dedicated to making sure the Games have no druggies. But the doped athletes and their doctors are always one step ahead.

No matter how many drugs the IOC adds to its banned list, and despite new and more effective testing methods, many athletes will slip under the radar. Complicating the increasing number of rules is the lack of enforcement. IOC officials admit the random drug-testing method it employs is an inadequate mess.

No wonder that those who get caught are often the unfortunate or stupid. Some of the recent athletes caught were using "old-school" drugs like steroids that are easily detectable; if they had some more time or money they could find a doctor who knows how to manipulate results. In the case of the young Romanian gold-medallist gymnast, she was duped by her doctor, who had put some banned drugs (not even performance-enhancing) in her cold medicine. But, as IOC drug czar Prince Alexandre de Merode pointed out, rules are rules.

The end result of all this nonsense is that nobody knows who's doped and who's clean, and so a cloud of suspicion is cast over all.