Christos Tzekos

Christos Tsekos or Christos Tzekos is a Greek athletics coach.

His surname is spelled Tzekos or Tsekos. He was the trainer of the 100m runners Konstantinos Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou. The three were at the center of a huge doping scandal at the start of the 2004 Summer Olympics. They were suspended by the IAAF in December 2004.

Tsekos, a former nutritional supplements salesman who lives alternatingly in his native Greece and his adopted home in Lincolnwood, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), had been involved in a number of doping-related incidents before.

In 1997, at an athletics event in Dortmund, Germany, a row occurred between Tsekos and an IAAF doping controller whom he prevented from testing four of his athletes, among them Ekaterini Thanou and Charis Papadias. It is allegedly said that Giorgos Panagiotopoulos (Tzekos' athlete) was the man that carried out the hard part of beating out the German doctor of anti-doping and giving Thanou and Papadias the time to fleet away. In 2003, U.S. authorities found e-mails by Victor Conte addressed to Tzekos while searching BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative), the company secretly dealing Tetrahydrogestrinone, an anabolic steroid specially designed so as to make it undetectable under normal drug testing.

The Greek national health authority fined Tsekos 14.800 Euros for illegally importing anabolic substances. In 2004 a raid on his office uncovered 1400 ampoules containing anabolic and other prohibited substances. Some sources say that these were just supplements without the appropriate legal papers for import in Greece.

According to To Vima, a respected Greek daily newspaper, Tsekos had proposed a secret program to the Greek government in 1997, which was projected at a cost of 6 million Euros and was intented to provide 150 Greek athletes with non-detectable doping substances in preparation for the 2004 Olympic Games. The government declined the offer. Tzekos had also stated on Greek TV channel Antenna that he has great admiration for the GDR sports program.

According to the respected French paper "L'Equipe" Christos Tzekos was directly dealing with the creator of norbolethone and THG (tetrahydrogestrinone) Patrick Arnold, the father of pro-hormone craze and some undetectable designer steroids.