This year’s version of the Winter Olympic Games played out like a crazy action movie complete with death defying car crashes, a suicidal skiing coach and Italian police busting down doors and raiding the living quarters of Olympic athletes.

The Winter Olympic Games have come to embody the spirit of winter sports everywhere. Events like hockey, figure skating, skiing, and bobsleighing have been common to the Games for years and have grown to be fan favorites. But the 2006 Winter Olympics that were held in Torino, Italy will be remembered for events quite different from any of these.

Different than what anyone could have ever imagined as there were police hunting down suspected blood dopers, an out of control skiing coach slamming his car into a police barricade, drug confiscations, and athletes being forced to endure blood tests the night before their event. And it all got kicked off on February 18th, when Italian police, accompanied by doping control officers, led an unprecedented raid through the rental houses of some Austrian Olympic skiers.

On this Saturday night, the normally quiet mountain towns of San Sincario and Pragelato awoke to the noises of police sirens hot on the trail of possible blood dopers. Their targets were the five houses that were being rented out by the Austrian cross-country and biathlon ski teams. They found ten skiers in the houses who were then taken to a nearby town for drug testing administered by the International Olympic Committee. But this isn’t all they found.

The raid turned up items such as a blood-transfusion machine, glucose drips, unlabeled and unprescribed medicine, and syringes scattered throughout four of the five houses that were searched. A bag full of used syringes that had been thrown out of a window was also found at one of the houses. As if the evidence that was found wasn’t incriminating enough of the Austrian ski teams, what wasn’t found might come as an even bigger indictment of their guilt.

Two of the skiers that were wanted for drug testing, Mikhail Botwinov and Christian Hoffmann, were not at any of the houses when the raids took place. In fact, they left the country before the raids happened. Two more skiers that were tested, Wolfgang Rottman and Wolfgang Perner, left the country after their tests and were kicked off of the team.

This bold and meticulously calculated raid marked the first time that doping control officers had ever been accompanied by police officers. The implications of this were best explained by chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound, when he said, “They are not just facing the sports authorities, who have no power to search. They are facing a combination of sports authorities and public authorities.”

So why did these Italian police and doping control officers choose a couple of Austrian ski teams to enact such a historic raid? The answer resided with a man sleeping in his car in the Italian Alps.

Walter Mayer had already been on the International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency radar for quite some time. The Nordic team ski coach ran the Austrian team during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. However, a few months after the Olympics ended, a blood doping scandal broke out that had Mayer’s name written all over it. In the end, Mayer ended up receiving a ban from the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the first time any team official had ever been banned for two future Games.

So it came as no surprise when both the IOC and World Anti-Doping Agency became alarmed at his presence with the Austrian teams in San Sincario and Pragelato. The fact that Mayer was hanging out with the Austrian ski teams became enough of a reason for a huge coordinated drug raid to take place. But Mayer was no where to be found in San Sincario or Pragelato because he was headed through the Alps on his way back to Austria.

Mayer didn’t make it back to Austria though as he pulled over to the side of the road and fell asleep. A local resident, who was suspicious of Mayer sleeping by the roadside, alerted authorities to his presence. As the police approached, Mayer sped away from them and, in turn, sparked a high speed car chase. One that wouldn’t end favorably for him either as he crashed into a two police car roadblock

Mayer would later say that he panicked when he heard on the radio that the Italian police were searching for him. He also admitted that he was trying to kill himself when he crashed into the police barricade. "I was completely shattered, I couldn\'t think clearly. When something like that happens to you, you are in an extraordinary mental situation. I wanted to take my own life, because my world had been destroyed. I wanted to end my life with the car," he added.

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