For a tiny, land-locked Alpine country like Austria, the Winter Olympics mean everything. Once every four years people stop confusing the place with Australia just long enough to see its army of athletes scoop up medals for downhill races, ski jumping and biathlon competitions. So a recent doping scandal surrounding the Austrian Olympians in Turin has an extra bitter taste for Germany's southern neighbor.

In a raid by Italian police on Saturday, officials found over 100 syringes, 30 packs of drugs, and even equipment for blood transfusions in the quarters of the Austrian biathlon and cross-country teams. The search was sparked by information that Austrian coach Walter Mayer, banned from the Games until beyond 2010 over his role in blood doping at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, was visiting the athletes. The raid set off a bizarre chain of events including the departure of two skiers and Mayer's flight back to Austria which ended in a crash and his admission into a psychiatric hospital. While International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials have been at pains to say not all Austrian athletes should be tarnished by the investigation, the doping affair has undoubtedly cast a shadow over several recent gold-medal victories by downhill skiers and the country's ski jumping team.

Following a second follow-up raid by Italian police on Monday, the nerves of some Austrian sporting officials are clearly beginning to fray. "What they are doing with us here is a scandal," Austrian Skiing Federation official Markus Gandler said according to the Austrian news agency APA. But German newspapers on Tuesday were less concerned with whether the once-proud Austrian Winter Olympians were being made scapegoats than with the implications the latest doping scandal will have for the sporting world at large.

The right-wing daily Die Welt looks at the growing cooperation between sport authorities such at the IOC and government prosecutors --  in this case the Italians. The paper points out that Italy has the strongest anti-doping laws in the world. Only together can the two sides effectively drive the scourge of cheating out of sport. "Sport and the state do not operate in the same sphere," writes Die Welt, explaining that groups like the IOC have the scientific know-how to catch doping and the governments the legal framework to punish those behind it. "Experts had expected Austria to cause a furor at the Winter Olympics" -- but by winning medals not for doping, comments the paper. Most surprisingly is that the country has already been caught before and that it should have known better than to let someone like Mayer so close to the athletes in Turin. "It seems winning medals is more important than fair play to some on the Austrian team."

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung devotes a special commentary to the subject of doping in its Olympics coverage. The daily writes that the games have long pretended to symbolize higher human ideals, but now even the IOC has felt compelled to call upon the Italian authorities to raid the Austrian quarters. "The guardians of these ideals are currently destroying their own perfect little world," writes the FAZ, suggesting that they've long known doping was becoming a big problem that had to be dealt with. "It seems as if they had no other choice but finally to get rid of the spoiled goods, in order to not lose everything." The paper believes that for anti-doping laws to be truly effective, all parties involved -- including the athletes -- must face criminal punishment. Whereas Italy has taken the lead, other countries such as Germany continue to lag behind in putting such laws on the books. But the latest affair shows the time to act has come: "As big as the disappointment is, in Turin the Olympics have undergone their total disillusionment."

The business paper Handelsblatt tops it editorial page with a cartoon lampooning the latest doping scandal. With an athlete sitting on an examining bed with tubes sticking into both arms, a doctor adjusts some medical equipment while asking: "What shall it be? Gold, silver or bronze?" In a guest editorial, Bernd Frick, who teaches sports economics at a private German university, argues the raids in Turin actually show just how ineffective the battle against doping has been so far. "When the likelihood of being caught after doping stays small enough, a rational "clean" athlete will reach for performance-enhancing substances if he thinks he can offset the disadvantage to the doping competition," Frick writes. "As interesting as the seven-hour police raid (in Italy) was, at the end of the day the regular practice of fighting doping with unannounced checks during training and competitions cannot disguise that such methods have up till today utterly failed." Perhaps somewhat unrealistically, he calls for the development of a culture of "denunciation" where athletes would be more willing to rat out their fellow competitors.