Noodles and wine are the secret ingredients for a strange new twist in China's doping saga

It looked like a recipe for disaster. So, when his country's swimmers were being accused of doping earlier this year, one Chinese official cooked up something fast. He blamed it on contaminated noodles.

In fact, he argued, it could have been a culinary conspiracy concocted by criminals, whose actions led to the cooking wine used to prepare the noodles being laced with a banned heart drug that found its way into an athlete's system.

This theory was spelled out to international anti-doping officials during a meeting and, after weeks of wrangling, finally made it into the thousands of pages of data handed over to the lawyer who investigated the case involving 23 Chinese swimmers who had tested positive for that same drug.

The attorney, appointed by the World Anti-Doping Agency, refused to consider that scenario as he sifted through the evidence. In spelling out his reasoning, lawyer Eric Cottier paid heed to the half-baked nature of the theory.