Former NBA star Lamar Odom admits to having cheated a drug test before the Olympics

The former NBA player of the year and double champion, Lamar Odom, revealed in his next memoir, "Darkness to Light", that he had cheated a drug test in order to play for USA Basketball at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

In an excerpt from the brief, obtained by People magazine, Odom writes that being offered a place on the team was "one of the greatest honors of my career". However, "the joy of being on the list of twelve players quickly I worried when Olympic officials informed me that I should pass a drug test before officially joining the team" he writes.

Odom, who claims to "smoke grass every day in the summer," then began looking for an online solution.

This January 2, 2013 archive photo shows Lamar Odom of the Los Angeles Clippers. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, AP)

"We started looking for" fake penises "in Google and looked at different ways to beat a drug test," he wrote.

So he ordered one, and although he was "paranoid, it would not work," he says, he used it – filled with his trainer's urine – and passed the test.

"An official stuck a thermometer in the cup to measure the temperature … satisfied that the pee was mine, said" Welcome to Team USA "," writes Odom.

The USA team, consisting of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Allen Iverson and Tim Duncan, then lost to Argentina in the semi-finals before winning a bronze medal. The most disappointing finish of the USA Basketball Olympic history.

Odom, who was traded from the Miami Heat to the Los Angeles Lakers a month before the 2004 Olympics, played and started the eight-game American team with an average of 9.3 points and 5.8 rebounds.

LeBron James, Lamar Odom and Stephon Marbury sit on the bench at the 2004 Olympic Games. (Photo: Robert Deutsch, USAT)

Odom has remained largely out of the spotlight since its troubling end in 2015, when he was found unresponsive while he was spending time in a Nevada broth after an almost fatal overdose while he was using cocaine and sexual performance supplements. He spent three months in the hospital after the incident.