Blood tests sport’s legitimacy
DOUBTS Athletics federation and the Olympic body in focus after revelation of ‘unusual blood results’
LONDON: The head of the world athletics governing body has dismissed as “a farce” the idea of redistributing scores of Olympic and world championship medals in the light of leaked data allegedly showing abnormal blood test results by athletes.
Lamine Diack, president of the IAAF, who steps down later this month, said it was impossible to say for certain that an athlete doped because of irregu- larities in blood tests.
“But it’s not because someone has a suspicious [blood] profile once that he was doped,” Diack said at an International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Kuala Lumpur. “When people say that there are medals to be redistributed from 2001 to 2012, it’s just a farce.”
However, Thomas Bach, the IOC president, said his organisation would take action if any allegations of doping could be proven against athletes at the Olympics. It was, Bach said, ultimately up to the World AntiDoping Agency (Wada) to investigate the claims, including that a third of medals in endurance races at the Olympics and world championships from 2001 to 2012, among them 55 golds, were won by athletes who recorded suspicious blood tests during their careers.
“If there should be cases involving results at Olympic Games, the IOC will react with zero tolerance with our usual policy,” Bach said. Lord Coe, who is who is bidding to replace Diack as IAAF president on a promise to reform the sport’s anti-doping programme, said on Sunday that he expected “a robust response” from the leak of thousands of elite athletes blood tests to German broadcaster ARD and the Sunday Times.
The TV station and newspaper analysed the results with two scientists, Robin Parisotto and Michael Ashenden, who calculated that more than 800 athletes recorded blood results that were described by Parisotto as “highly suggestive of doping, or at the very least abnormal”. Diack argued that blood data alone was not enough to prove doping, and questioned the timing of the reports, ahead of the athletics world championships in Beijing later this month.
“They are playing with the idea of a redistribution of medals,” he said. “It’s possible, if we prove with the new techniques at our disposal that someone doped.”