Malta has been represented at the following Commonwealth Games and in nine editions it has successfully obtained a silver medal and three bronze medals.

The Maltese Olympic Committee has participated in the following Games:

1958 – Cardiff, Wales – British Empire and Commonwealth Games

1962 – Perth, Australia – British Empire and Commonwealth Games

1970 – Edinburgh, Scotland – British Commonwealth Games

1982 – Brisbane, Australia – Commonwealth Games

1990 – Auckland, New Zealand – Commonwealth Games (Laurie Pace – Judo – Bronze Medal)

1994 – Victoria, Canada – Commonwealth Games

1998 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Commonwealth Games

2002 – Manchester, England Commonwealth Games (William Chetcuti – Bronze Medal – Double Trap)

2006 – Melbourne, Australia Commonwealth (Rebecca Madyson – Silver Medal; William Chetcuti – Bronze Medal)

Ducks beware: 2012 triathlon heads to Hyde Park

CAROLINE CHEESE

AP sports writer

Triathletes at the 2000 Olympics had to negotiate Sydney’s shark-infested harbour, so the ducks and geese of London’s Hyde Park seem unlikely to cause much fear in 2012.

Revealing their plans for the first ‘downtown’ triathlon since the event’s debut at the Sydney Games, London 2012 Olympic organisers also promised that the park’s thriving wildlife would not be unduly disturbed either.

“We have no plans to round up the ducks and geese,” Royal Parks chief executive Mark Camley said. “They’ll waddle off in their own way.”

Hyde Park is set to provide a picturesque backdrop to two of the games’ more gruelling events: the triathlon and the marathon swim. Its central location, close to Knightsbridge and Marble Arch, could also make those events some of the most popular with the public.

Half a million people lined the streets to watch the triathlon in Sydney. In 2012, a temporary stand overlooking the start-finish line by Hyde Park’s Serpentine lake will hold 3,000 spectators, but thousands more will be able to watch along the course.

London 2012 sports director Debbie Jevans described it as “ultimately a free-ticket event.”

“It’s right in the middle of London, you look around you and it’s just a wonderful venue,” said British marathon swimmer Cassie Patten, a bronze medallist at the 2008 Beijing Games. “I got goosebumps when I arrived this morning, butterflies in my stomach.

“I’ve swum at Albert Dock in Liverpool in front of maybe 50 people, so to swim in London in front of a home crowd is going to be unreal. Every day when I wake up, it’s in the back of my mind, but you’ve just to keep training as if it wasn’t there because you could become overwhelmed by it.”

Patten had to contend with being stung by jellyfish as she captured silver at the 2007 swimming world championships in Melbourne.

Nothing so dangerous lurks in the Serpentine, and the lake’s size is likely to provide the main challenge.

“The water here is a really nice quality, a good temperature,” she said. “Normally, we do four laps of 2.5 kilometres; here we’ll be doing six laps, which obviously means there are more turns.

“But with open water swimming, you have to embrace the fact that no event will be the same as the one before, and we’ve got two years to get used to it.”

Rogge: Cricket scandal highlights bigger problem

RAF CASERT

AP sports writer

IOC president Jacques Rogge believes cricket match-fixing scandal shows that illegal betting has become as big a blight on sports as doping.

Without taking any stand on the fixing allegations against three Pakistan cricketers, Rogge said on Thursday the main problem for sports across the globe was illegal companies betting on incremental parts of a game as that makes it tougher to eliminate.

“It is far more widespread than it really emerges. Yes, absolutely,” he told a small group of reporters.

After doping has scarred sports for the last decades, “now we have a second threat of the same magnitude – illegal betting,” he said.

British newspaper News of the World alleged on Sunday that two Pakistani players were paid to deliberately bowl no-balls in the opening day of the fourth test against England at Lord’s last week. The captain has also been implicated

Rogge says it’s essential to increase cooperation with judicial authorities and Interpol, since phone tapping, house raids and luggage checks could be essential elements in investigations.

The IOC and sporting federations are working closely with legal betting companies to contain any fixing of matches or irregularities, but Rogge complained shadowy companies, mainly in Asia, still escape their grasp.

Since the major events are now thoroughly checked, illegal betting syndicates have moved further down the chain, to lower-division games or centering on tiny elements of a game that may not even affect the overall outcome. He said the issue of no-balls fitted the description. “There are many (betting sites) in Asia that come up on the net, then disappear, that transform themselves. The identity of these websites who are not regulated by law is a very difficult one,” Rogge said. “The website is unknown and the action on the match is very veiled. It could be a double fault in tennis, a no-ball in cricket, a first corner in football.

“I am afraid we are in the situation we were with doping before, where people knew there was some doping but could not quantify it. Today we can quantify doping. We need to quantify illegal betting.”

The three Pakistan cricketers facing allegations of fixing insisted they were innocent, but withdrew from the rest of their team’s tour of England. Their omission should allow Pakistan to play its two Twenty20 and five one-day international matches against England without objection from the England and Wales Cricket Board or International Cricket Council.

In other comments, Rogge said he was saddened to see the new anti-doping allegations surface against seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and was convinced US authorities would be extremely exhaustive in their probe.

Jeff Novitzky, a Food and Drug Administration agent, and a federal prosecutor have been handling an inquiry into allegations of organised doping in professional cycling, including whether Armstrong and members of his United States Postal Service team may have been involved. The team won six of Armstrong’s record seven Tour victories after beating cancer.

“You know how thorough the judicial authorities are in the United States. They will go the long way to find anything, if possible. But, will they find something? That is the question mark,” Rogge said.

Armstrong became a more important figure in the probe this spring after disgraced cyclist Floyd Landis, who won the 2006 Tour but was stripped of his title for doping, dropped long-standing denials and admitted he used performance-enhancing drugs and accused Armstrong, among others, of doping.

ADA reports breakthrough in gene doping tests

STEPHEN WILSON

AP sports writer

Two groups of scientists have developed tests for gene doping in what the World Anti-Doping Agency hailed on Friday as a major breakthrough in fighting the next frontier in cheating in sports.

Scientists in Germany said they have come up with a blood test that can provide “conclusive proof” of gene doping, even going back as far as 56 days from when the doping took place.

And a US-French research team has devised its own method for detecting genetic doping in muscles.

The discoveries raise the possibility that a valid gene-doping test can be implemented across the sports world by the 2012 London Olympics.

“This is a really significant and major breakthrough,” WADA director general David Howman told AP in a telephone interview. “This is a project we’ve been engaged in since 2002. Now we’ve reached the situation where we’re pretty certain that it can be detected.”

Gene doping is the practice of using genetic engineering to artificially enhance athletic performance. It is a spinoff of gene therapy, which alters a person’s DNA to fight disease. The method is banned by WADA and the International Olympic Committee.

WADA funded $2 million in research projects to devise reliable tests, which have taken about four years to develop. Researchers said the tests can detect gene doping directly through blood samples.

“It’s not through markers, it’s through actual detection,” Howman said. “There’s a significant difference there. Using the marker method is more a probability approach, whereas the method these researchers have come up with is stone cold dead, 100 per cent.”

Howman said the tests must still go through a scientific validation process but should be implemented “within two years.”

Asked whether they would be ready in time for the London Olympics, he said, “It’s certainly possible.”

In any case, samples will be stored so they can retested later, Howman said.

While experts say they don’t believe gene doping is being abused yet by athletes, they suspect it’s only a matter of time.

Howman said WADA has information that some hospitals around the world are offering genetic transfers to patients.

“I think we’ve had sufficient anecdotal information to say it’s happening, but whether it’s happening across the world of sport is another issue,” he said.

In Germany, scientists at Tuebingen and Mainz universities said they found a “relatively low-cost method” for detecting gene doping through conventional blood samples. They said it had previously been thought that gene doping could only be detected through costly indirect molecular tests.

The findings were published in the online edition of the scientific journal Gene Therapy last Thursday.

The study said the test provides clear “yes or no answers” on whether DNA in blood samples has been transferred into the body to create performance-enhancing substances such as the endurance-boosting hormone EPO.

“The body of a gene-doped athlete produces the performance-enhancing hormones itself without having to introduce any foreign substances to the body,” Prof. Perikles Simon of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz said. “Over time, the body becomes its own doping supplier.”

Foreign genetic material was inserted into the muscles of laboratory mice, triggering excess production of a hormone that creates new blood vessels. Two months later, researchers could still differentiate between the mice that underwent gene doping and those that didn’t.

The detection method was then backed up in tests on 327 blood samples taken from professional and recreational athletes, the researchers said.

“At the very least, the risk of being discovered months after the gene transfer has taken place should deter even the most daring dopers,” Simon said.

Meanwhile, a separate study by scientists from the University of Florida and Nantes University in France was reported in Molecular Therapy, the official journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy.