More Olympic medallists test positive
LONDON: Forty-five more athletes, including 23 medallists from the 2008 Beijing Games, have been caught for doping after retesting of samples from the last two Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Friday.
The new cases bring to 98 the total number of athletes who have failed tests so far in the reanalysis of their stored samples from Beijing and the 2012 Olympics in London. Using “the very latest scientific analysis methods,” the latest round of retests produced 30 “provisional” positive findings from Beijing and 15 confirmed positives from London, the IOC reported. No names were given.
The IOC stores doping samples for 10 years so they can be retested when new methods become available, meaning drug cheats who escaped detection at the time can be caught years later. The retesting programme has targeted athletes who were in contention to compete at the upcoming Olympics in Rio, but has also been widened to cover many medallists.
“All athletes found to have infringed the anti-doping rules will be banned from competing” at the Rio Games, the IOC said.
The announcement comes at a time when the IOC is weighing whether to ban Russia from the Rio Olympics over allegations of systematic and state-run doping.
On Thursday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld an IAAF ban on Russia’s track and field athletes from the games.
The IOC executive board is scheduled to hold a meeting on Sunday amid calls by anti-doping bodies to exclude Russia entirely from Rio.
The IOC said the previous first wave of retests had found 30 positive cases from Beijing and 23 from London. The Russian Olympic Committee has said 22 of those cases involved Russian athletes, including medalists. A total of 1,243 samples have been retested so far in the first two waves of the reanalysis programme. The 30 new positive cases from Beijing involved athletes from four sports and eight countries.