Three months ago, Chinese sports fans got the first inkling that something was terribly wrong in the camp of Ma Junren, the legendary sports coach on whom the country was pinning its Olympic hopes. The occasion was the National Grand Prix finals in Jinzhou where, as usual, the colourful trainer was surrounded by thuggish young bodyguards and hoards of fans. In the women's 800 metres final, two of Ma's star runners, Lin Na and Yang Wei, were unexpectedly trounced by underdog Wang Yuanping.

A Chinese reporter innocently asked 55-year-old Ma to explain the loss. The response was an outburst of fury from the hoarse-voiced, chain-smoking coach. In front of thousands of spectators, he raged that the blame lay with officials who had conducting drug tests, interfering with his preparation, and claimed a urine test had taken six hours because his athletes had trouble providing adequate specimens.

Well, now we know why Ma was so upset. He had been pumping his runners with banned performance-enhancing substitutes, probably erythropoietin, or EPOEPO, which stimulates the production of oxygen-rich red blood cells, something the Chinese Olympic Committee apparently established this week before throwing Ma and six of his seven runners off the Olympics squad bound for Sydney.

So ends, presumably, the career of the athletics trainer who for most of a decade was China's most colourful sporting personality, a legend to Chinese athletic fans, but a tyrant to his charges, and something of a snake oil salesman.

It started in a blaze of glory in 1993. Ma became a national and international celebrity when his "army" of short-haired young Chinese women athletes, led by Wang Junxia, won a clean sweep of the 1,500m, 3,000m and 10,000m at the world championships in Stuttgart. In the 3,000 metres, favourite Sonia O'Sullivan found herself finishing fourth behind three Chinese in formation who had suddenly flitted in from nowhere. A month later Ma's army set world records for the same three distances at the Chinese national games in Beijing.

The sporting world was not just amazed, but deeply suspicious that the Chinese runners had used banned stimulants. Ma Junren protested: "I have never seen any drugs. I don't even know what drugs are."

The sporting world began to look more closely at Ma Junren. What did he have that other world coaches lacked? Iron discipline certainly, a result of his two earlier careers, as a soldier in the People's Liberation Army and as a prison guard for seven years.

As a middle-school coach in the mid-1980s he was once reprimanded for physically abusing young athletes, but got away with such behaviour because officials were pleased with his astonishing results, according to Zhao Yu, a freelance Chinese writer whose exhaustive book, An Inquiry Into Ma's Army, was published in 1997.

Some fans swallowed the story, which Ma encouraged, that his mother was a "deer deity", a mythical beast which helped athletes run faster. And word got around - perhaps also originating from Ma - that he had a secret elixir which helped athletes recover quickly from exhaustion, made from the blood of freshly decapitated turtles and a fungus which grew on a type of caterpillar found only in the Tibetan highlands.

The potion, according to Zhao, contained traditional Chinese health remedies, including red ginseng, deer tail, rhizoma gastrodiae, the root of membranous milk vetch, Chinese wolfberries, donkey-hide gelatin, jujube and Chinese angelica: all harmless and certainly not illegal.

Along with donkey-hide soup, the brew was drunk regularly by the mainly uneducated peasant girls whom Ma took under his wing and subjected to military-type training. He got them to run 65 kilometres a day, six days a week. Cosmetics, long hair and boyfriends were forbidden. Some were required to run behind a motorcycle to which they were attached by a rope.

Ma lost his temper easily. He once allegedly threw a brick at a runner who displeased him, and was said to beat runners who tried to defect to other coaches. Former women's shot-put world champion Huang Zhihoing said: "Ma used to call us dirty words. His girls have to do his laundry and prepare his food for him."

THE barracks-style regime was partly the cause of a revolt by his best performers after the 1994 Asian Games in Hiroshima. His star, Wang Junxia, who later won gold at Atlanta, left him, complaining he was physically abusive and had confiscated her prize money and a Mercedes car donated by the International Amateur Athletics Federation after her Stuttgart victory (she later collected it).

Distance runners Qu Yunxia and Liu Dong were also awarded a Mercedes-Benz each for winning gold medals in Stuttgart, but did not receive their prizes. Ma kept one of the cars and crashed it within a month, leaving him and his wife in hospital with serious injuries.

Like the former Chinese leader, Mao Tsedong, Ma evidently believed in sweeping acts of defiance against nature. At Hiroshima he stunned everyone by revealing that 11 of his long-distance runners, more than half his squad, had their appendices removed within the previous year, because of "toxicological problems".

"They had them all done at the same time," Ma said, "can you imagine what it cost?" He would not say if this mass surgery was because of over-training, just: "If there's a problem, you take it out."

In Hiroshima Ma promoted sales of his magic potion, which had turned into a miracle money-spinner. By this stage he had become wealthy by promoting his elixirs, taking a 20 per cent share in a venture making Ma's Family Army Number One Tonic which sold well throughout Asia, despite evidence from Hong Kong experts that the worm-based drink was just a nourishing health tonic.

Ma was upset by Zhao's book. He accused the author of errors and distortions, and threatened, but never took, libel action. He suffered a breakdown and entered a mental hospital where he said he was treated for schizophrenia. When he came out in 1988 he admitted to mistakes in the past, and promised to serve his country better.

Ma started the new phase in his life by building a state-of-the-art training base in his hometown of Dalian in Liaoning province. He seemed to have regained his coaching touch and gathered together a new army of female runners who left international athletes floundering in the Beijing International Road Relay earlier this year.

Ma was back and Chinese fans began counting medals. The media encouraged the frisson of anticipation. When seven of his runners were chosen for the Olympic squad, the China Daily said: "Controversial track coach Ma Junren proved that no one can shatter his status in the nation."

Last week he could be found back to his old form - cursing, shouting orders and waving his cigarette-holder during midnight training sessions in the thin air of his training camp on the Tibetan plateau as Chinese hopes rose of gold in the 5,000m and 10,000m in Sydney.

But Ma displayed another outburst of anger when testers turned up last week to take blood and urine samples for the fourth time this year. What he did not seem to realise was that the Chinese Olympic Committee was determined not to allow any more embarrassing positive tests at international competitions, especially with Beijing desperately keen to get the 2008 Games when the selection is made next July.

The last tests evidently proved positive. On Sunday Ma suddenly disappeared from the camp and most of the athletes were driven off in buses. The game was up.