Below-Zero Tolerance

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From all outward signs, the sixth day of the Olympic Games was sliding along as smoothly as the first five. Snowboarders were shredding the morning away up in the Alps, while fans down in Torino prepared to celebrate a surprise Italian gold in speedskating. Even official confirmation that Russian biathlon silver medalist Olga Pyleva had tested positive for banned substances seemed, by past Olympic standards, like a small patch of bad ice. But by late afternoon on Feb. 16 — unbeknownst to the athletes, the trainers and the worldwide TV audience — major trouble was brewing in Torino. A hurried closed-door meeting was under way at the local command center of the Carabinieri, Italy's paramilitary police, that would lead to the one big black mark of the 20th Winter Games: a spiraling doping drama featuring a suicidal Austrian coach, a crusading Italian magistrate and an unprecedented nighttime police raid — all of which could change the way that future Olympics fight the war against banned substances.

The saga began to unfold just before 5 p.m. when Mario Pescante, Italy's official representative to the Winter Games, arrived at the office of Carabinieri Colonel Angelo Agovino carrying a slim file and a photograph of a stout 48-year-old named Walter Mayer. The Austrian cross-country and biathlon team coach had been busted after prohibited blood-transfusion equipment was found after the Salt Lake Games in 2002, and banned from the Olympics for 10 years (although he always claimed it was not doping but a form of paramedical disease prevention). Now there was evidence that Mayer was staying with the Austrian team during the Games and was perhaps up to his old tricks. Pescante, a 67-year-old Cabinet Under-Secretary for Sport who is also an International Olympic Committee (i.o.c.) member, told Time the organization "felt provoked" by Mayer's presence after he'd been denied official Olympic accreditation.

Although Pescante said he was "just passing the information on" to the Carabinieri, Olympic officials were well aware that Italy has one of the world's toughest antidoping legislation, including a unique law that makes a single use of banned performance-enhancing substances a felony. Torino also happens to be home to Raffaele Guariniello, Italy's most expert and aggressive prosecutor of alleged doping scofflaws, who was bound to pounce on any hint of an infraction. "You need criminal justice. It gives you investigative means," Guariniello told Time, in his first public comments since the scandal broke. "Sports officials can't do searches, tap phones, sequester material."

And thus the suspicion of athletes altering their body chemistry became something like an antiterrorist campaign. For two more days, plainclothes Caribinieri agents went up in the Alps, hunting for any signs of Mayer. "We never saw him with our own eyes," Agovino told Time during an interview at Carabinieri headquarters. "But we confirmed that he had been staying with the Austrian team."