While hoping to avoid a repeat of last year's Race Weekend drug scandal, which saw two top runners fail dope tests, Bermuda Track and Field Association chief Judith Simmons said the organisation were ready to take on the cheats.

Marathon winner Luiz Carlos Ramos of Brazil was banned for two years from international competition after a positive drug test for nandrolone and Dutch athlete Neals Strik, third in the half-marathon, tested positive for cocaine.

Strik was later convicted and sentenced in his homeland for smuggling cocaine between there and Guatemala. The prosecution in the case portrayed the distance runner as the brains behind a thriving drug ring.

Simmons said measures were in place to counter those seeking to flout the spirit of the occasion and said organisers had the complete backing of legitimate athletes.

"Most athletes, and even those that I have seen in Monaco at the World Athletics finals, have told me that they are glad they (Ramos and Strik) got caught because they don't like cheats," she said. "No one wants to be beaten by someone who has tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. Therefore, the athletes are all in favour of it.

"There are some, yes, that will do the newest thing (drug) that is coming up because that one's not going to be detected but, by and large, most athletes adhere to the rules and would like for no one to win unless they are as clean as they are."

Simmons said as quick as people were finding ways around the tests, athletics' chiefs were devising ways of combating them.

"The IAAF (International Amateur Athletics Federation) is continually improving means of testing. As fast as the labs are making new drugs that are undetectable, there are labs also devising ways to detect them, so it's an ongoing process," she said, adding that Bermuda's samples were sent to the Olympic laboratory in Montreal, Canada.