Bach confident SKorea Games will go on
Sochi dope test failures to be heard October
LIMA, Peru, Sept 16, (Agencies): The president of the International Olympic Committee said Friday he remains confident the Winter Games will go on as scheduled in South Korea despite growing tensions on the peninsula, including North Korea’s ballistic missile test this week.
At the close of this week’s IOC meetings, Thomas Bach said the committee will continue to appeal for diplomatic solutions to the problems, and that it is monitoring deliberations in the UN Security Council, which on Friday condemned the North Korean test.
The Olympics are scheduled for Feb 8-25 in Pyeongchang.
North Korea’s IOC member, Ung Chang, said he hopes the Olympics will go on as planned. When asked if South Korea will be safe for the Olympics, he responded: “Nobody knows.”
Bach will visit the UN next week, but will be working on the traditional Olympic Truce declaration. He said the IOC has no plans to be involved in diplomacy over the Korean crisis.
“We will carefully observe,” Bach said. “We are not getting involved in this.”
The first hearings of athletes who failed drug tests at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics following the retesting of samples, will take place in October, International Olympic Committee member Denis Oswald said in Lima on Friday.
In light of the initial results, the IOC’s disciplinary commission “will summon the athletes to appear in early October with decisions soon following”, said Oswald, president of the commission.
The commission will then have the power to disqualify the athletes and to withdraw the medals.
Following the reanalyses of samples carried out after the Beijing 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics, 106 returned positive results and “99 athletes were disqualified”, said Oswald in a review presented at the closing session of the IOC in the Peruvian capital on Friday.
In total “75 medals were withdrawn in order to be reassigned”, he added.
The positive cases affected 16 countries with the worst offenders being Russia (37 cases), Belarus (16), Ukraine (11) and Kazakhstan (12).
The most sanctioned sports are weightlifting (49) ahead of athletics (46) and wrestling (eight).
Boxing, cycling and modern pentathlon account for one each.
The most frequently detected substances in the retests were turinabol (68) and stanozolol (31), anabolic steroids already widely used in the former East Germany.
The IOC also renewed the mandates of 16 members including Kuwait’s influential Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, an important figure in FIFA as well as the IOC, who was the subject of an American investigation into alleged corruption.
Al-Sabah resigned from FIFA in May but has denied any wrongdoing.
American Anita DeFrantz has won her second term as vice president of the International Olympic Committee.