EQUESTRIAN: Andrew Hoy, a three-time Olympic champion for Australia, was accused by the International Equestrian Foundation of using illegal spiked boots in a March competition. The abuse case was rejected in the IOC's home city of Lausanne, Switzerland yesterday.

SWIMMING: A horrible week for the U.S. swim team, which began with the positive dope test of 50m freestyler Jessica Hardy, got worse. Michael Lohberg, coach of 41-year-old legend Dara Torres, was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a bone marrow disorder that shuts off red blood cell production. He may not live to see the Games.

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Geomagnetic investigators in Germany have uncovered a horse track at Olympia, buried for 1,600 years. Is it the Hippodrome, the venue where Nero the Roman Emperor bribed his way to Olympic glory in 67 AD?

It's one of the more mystifying questions of the sporting world: with over 1 billion people, why isn't India more of an athletic power? The nation has only earned 17 total medals since 1900, just one more than Greece (pop. 11 million) won at Athens four years ago. The Guardian explores the complicated net of issues.

Speaking of Greece: according to Mental Floss, 21 of the 22 venues built specifically for the 2004 Athens Games have fallen into disrepair and require security details to curb vandalism. Only the Goudi Olympic Hall, the badminton arena and now a theater, remains in use.

Male sex drug Viagra has recently been implicated as a possible blood doping aid. An Australian scientist posits that Beijing 2008 might become the Viagra Games.

[Robin] Parisotto, a former senior scientist with the Australian Institute of Sport, said Viagra had the same benefits as blood doping because it opens up arteries and veins -- "and not only in the private parts".

The Uni Watch blog looks at the United States' track and field uniforms since Kappa outfitted the team in all red at Los Angeles 1984.

And in China...

A series of statues closely resembling a certain heavily-copyrighted American mouse have popped up around Beijing's financial district. Is it Mickey? You be the judge.

When the Chinese national team files into the "Bird's Nest" stadium at the Opening Ceremony (last, of course), there will be 639 athletes in the contingent. Add in all the officials, and there will be 1,099 delegation members in total.

The Athletes' Village is starting to fill up, with 35 of the 205 national delegations taking up residence.

According to government officials, Shanghai police cracked a terrorist plot involving that city's football stadium. Shanghai Stadium will host six preliminary matches, as well as a men's quarterfinal and bronze medal match, and two playoffs for women.

The final batch of Olympic tickets went on sale -- 820,000 in total -- with long lines and a few scuffles involving queue-jumpers.

This blog has a journalistic hero, and that hero is James Reynolds. The BBC's Beijing correspondent has been turning in fascinating work on a daily basis, and no other on-the-spot writer has consistently offered as high a level of on-the-street, laser-focused, you-are-there coverage. His latest dispatch comes in regards to the ticketing queue incidents.

Lu Jianhua, a 40-year-old construction worker had queued up for 24 hours. He told us that when he got to the front of the queue someone pushed him. He shouted back. And the police pulled him out of the queue... Mr Lu was then let back in the queue - but he didn't have the right piece of paper to show that he'd been queuing up properly - so when he got to the ticket booth he wasn't allowed to buy any tickets for the Games.

As he told us what happened, he started to cry.

"I wanted to watch the diving very much. We'll probably get the Olympics here just once every hundred years. If I could just watch the Games, I'd feel my life wasn't wasted. But I missed that opportunity today,"

Then he knelt down and started sobbing. That's how much the Olympics matters to some people in this country.

(Photo © Icon SMI)