Mystery spices up the Games

One week into these Olympics, with the starting gun about to launch the centre-piece of track and field and with Steve Redgrave's crack at history just 36 hours away, a much needed dash of controversy has finally been added.

So far the flavour of the games has been almost too sweet. Local crowds watching on giant screens in the open air have been terribly good natured - I haven't seen a soul vomiting or picking a fight; how much they have to learn from us, their Colonial parents - and competitors have shown humility in victory and grace in defeat; and that scarily mature 17-year-old Ian Thorpe has been nothing less than Kiplingesque in his evenhanded treatment of triumph and comparative disaster.

A change to the scoring system in the boxing has made any of those riotous travesties of old almost impossible, while the glut of positive drugs tests has yet to materialise. It's all too beautiful, to borrow from the song, but now at last the requisite pinch of pepper has been added to the stew.

Two pinches, in fact, one small, the other less so. At the time of writing, it's hard to be sure exactly what is going on with Marie-Jose Perec, but unless taking two eight hour flights in 24 hours is a revolutionary mode of preparing for 400 metres races (perhaps it has some newly discovered effect on lactic acid?), she will not be defending her Olympic 400 metres title, robbing the games of her eagerly-anticipated clash with Cathy Freeman.

Perec and her boyfriend's scrape with police in Singapore after an incident involving a photographer - and even in the country that outlawed chewing gum, criminalising the beating up of snappers seems absurdly Draconian - follows her shock departure from Sydney on the grounds, so she claims, of media harassment.

It's all very odd. The Australian media may specialise in moronic jingoism, but they do not strike me as especially vicious. Then again, perhaps they were driven to bullying poor Mary Jo by fear of further disappointment for one of their great heroes. After all, although no home-grown hack will admit it, things in the swimming pool have not come close to the expectations of total dominance. Last night, a 200 metre butterfly final plugged beforehand as a straight fight between Australians Susie O'Neill and Petria Thomas, was won by American Misty Hyman.