45 more Games athletes suspected of doping

Many performances at recent Olympic Games continue to be exposed as fraudulent, as the International Olympic Committee announced Friday that in its broad re-examination of drugtesting results it had identified 45 more athletes suspected of having doped at the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2012 London Games. Half of them were medallists. The IOC’s announcement was the second of its kind since May, when Olympic officials revealed that the first round of reanalysis of Olympic samples found that 53 athletes from at least 12 countries had used banned substances at the last two Summer Games.

The second wave of retesting, announced on Friday, further tainted the results of those competitions, bringing the total number of implicated athletes to 98.

The new results impacted 30 more athletes from eight countries who competed across four sports in Beijing, and 15 athletes from nine countries who competed in two sports in London, according to the IOC.

The IOC said it could not immediately identify the implicated athletes for legal reasons and was in the process of informing the athletes, their national Olympic committees and specific sport federations.

Olympic officials are under fierce pressure in the face of revelations of a government-run doping program in Russia that went undetected for years, corrupted the results of both the Winter and Summer Games, and has called into question global sports’ antidoping system — as well as sports officials’ own will to police drug offences.

“The new reanalysis once again shows the commitment of the IOC in the fight against doping,” Thomas Bach, president of the organization, said in a statement.

In Friday’s announcement, the IOC said retests of past doping samples — which the organization has the authority to conduct for 10 years after competition — would continue in two more rounds, to be conducted during and after the Rio Olympics that begin on August 5.

The relevant urine samples of athletes dating to the 2008 Games are stored in the freezer of a laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland. In its announcement, the IOC said it had used “the very latest scientific analysis methods.”