National Post (National Edition)
Weightlifters still making a mockery of Olympic Games.
Items that may grow up to be columns, Vol. XVIII, Chapter 15:
The Dead Lift: All right, boys and girls. Put your hands in the air — minus the weights — and face the wall.
The day has arrived, probably 20 years after any reasonable person already gave up on it, for weightlifting to be frogmarched out of the Olympic Games.
As long as it’s included among the sports on the program, no one can possibly take the World AntiDoping Agency or the International Olympic Committee seriously.
Four Dozen Bad Eggs: The latest count from retesting of samples from the Beijing and London Olympics has 48 lifters, including six medallists from 2012 alone, stripped of their results for positive tests.
And here’s the kicker, which would be funny if it weren’t so sad: in the 94-kg class in London, six of the top nine lifters have been nailed, meaning the Pole who finished ninth, Tomasz Zielinski, would be in line for the bronze.
Problem is, Zielinski was sent home from the Rio Games in 2016 after he failed a test for nandrolone at his national championships the month before. So maybe not.
Notorious: That 94-kg cesspool is now rivalling the men’s 100-metre final from Seoul as the dirtiest competition ever, though only Ben Johnson paid the big price in 1988. Subsequently, five of the other seven finalists in the Olympics’ marquee event tested positive for various substances.
The Russian silver medalwinning lifter in London, Alexsandr Ivanov, was not only taking an anabolic steroid but also a breast cancer drug, tamoxifen. Hopefully, he also has regular Pap tests.
Altogether, in all sports, more than 75 athletes from London and Beijing have come up positive in re-testing, 40 of them medallists. The record books are written in pencil.
And Justice for Some: The problem with re-testing old samples is that those who cheated in Beijing and who only now are being named have had eight years to reap the rewards, while the ones who belatedly get medals receive them too late to capitalize on the moment and the warm-and-fuzzy acclaim that follows a realtime win.
It took new, exponentially more sensitive technology to detect traces of the old-fashioned steroids many of these lifters — almost 100 per cent from former Soviet republics — were using.
Beijing was 20 years after Seoul, yet lifters using stanozolol, the Ben Johnson drug, escaped detection. Turinabol? It’s been around since the East German doping machine of the ’70s and ’80s.
MEANWHILE IN RUSSIA: The latest ploy to duck the anti-doping authorities, according to a report in the New York Times, is to have Russian athletes training in military compounds, which the testers are not allowed to enter for “security” reasons.
That, combined with athletes refusing to provide details of their whereabouts, and the recent Russian cyberattacks on WADA’s database, is telling WADA all it needs to know about Russia’s participation in a state-sponsored pattern of evasion and public denial.
And WADA and the IOC haven’t even released any of the results from the Turin and Vancouver Olympics yet, let alone Sochi, where the Russian labs, which remain decertified, were famously corrupted. PAGING MR. BELICHICK: The suggestion that B.C. Lions’ 42-15 drubbing by Calgary in the Western final was the result of B.C.’s Wally Buono being out-coached makes for a lively discussion, but get real, people.
The Stampeders are a well-oiled machine from GM John Hufnagel to coach Dave Dickenson to equipment man George Hopkins and everyone in between. They are absolutely in mid-stride of their dominant period with the best player in the league, Bo Levi Mitchell, at the controls.
The most brilliant coaching job ever might have been able to mitigate the damage, but the only team that could have kept the Stamps from winning that game was the Stamps.
SNAPSHOTS: Candid camera footage on Sunday caught Dallas Cowboys rookie QB sensation Dak Prescott sitting on the sidelines, missing the garbage can behind him with an empty Gatorade cup, then getting up and retrieving it, and placing it in the trash. A small thing, but kind of charming … Unashamedly happy for Henry Burris, the personable Ottawa Redblacks QB, who’ll start his second straight Grey Cup as a 40-plus old-timer. That post-game interview Sunday on TSN, which his wife Nicole interrupted and took over while Burris smiled and hugged his kids, was a beautiful thing … More than a little impressed with Mackenzie Hughes, draining that 18-footer for par to win a five-man playoff for the RSM Classic title on the PGA Tour. The 25-year-old two-time Canadian Amateur champ from Dundas, Ont., was clutch down the stretch, and it’s no mean feat to win wireto-wire, which no Tour rookie had done in 20 years.