Antidoping rules flouted nearly 1600 times

MONTREAL: There were nearly 1600 antidoping rules violations in 2016 involving athletes and support staff from 117 nationalities across 112 sports, topped by athletics, the World AntiDoping Agency (Wada) said in a report released yesterday.

A total of 229,514 samples were collected in 2016 and analysed by Wadaaccredited laboratories resulting in 1595 antidoping violations.

Of those, 1326 were derived from adverse analytical findings and the remainder were from investigations and evidencebased intelligence into 248 violations committed by athletes and 21 by support staff.

‘‘The 2016 . . . report makes for particularly interesting reading in combination with Wada’s 2016 antidoping testing figures report that was published last year,’’ Wada president Craig Reedie said in a statement.

‘‘We are continuing to see the impact of intelligencebased testing, an area of increasing focus for the agency as we strengthen our investigations and intelligencegathering capacity.’’

The vast majority of adverse analytical findings (79%) were produced by male athletes (1046) and were the results of results collected during incompetition testing (78%).

Athletics topped the list of sports with the highest number of violations on 205, followed by bodybuilding (183), cycling (165), weightlifting (116) and football (79).

The sports rounding out the top nine were powerlifting (70), wrestling (64), rugby union (56), aquatics (35) and boxing (35).

Italy topped the list of countries with the most violations on 147, followed by France (86), the United States (76) and Australia (75).

Russia, whose participation at the 2016 Rio Olympics and 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games was restricted following an investigation which uncovered evidence of widespread statesponsored doping, was tied for sixth with India on 69. — Reuters