Dozens may be banned from Rio for doping

Dozens of athletes expecting to compete at the coming Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro could be barred from the Games, the International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday.

The IOC retested 454 doping samples from the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, it said, discovering suspicious results among 31 athletes from 12 countries and six sports. The athletes were not publicly identified Tuesday. The countries in question will be notified in coming days, according to a spokesman.

Another 250 doping samples from the 2012 Summer Games in London are due to be retested, officials said, announcing broad scrutiny of athletes who have competed in recent Olympic Games.

The announcement came in the wake of a detailed account last week by the former longtime director of Russia’s anti-doping lab, Grigory Rodchenkov, who said he worked for years at the direction of the Russian government to help the country’s top athletes use banned, performanceenhancing substances and go undetected.

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the claims, according to two people familiar with the case.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York is scrutinizing Russian government officials, athletes, coaches, anti-doping authorities and anyone who might have benefited unfairly from a doping regime, according to the people, who did not have authorization to speak about the inquiry publicly. Prosecutors are believed to be pursuing conspiracy and fraud charges.

Rodchenkov told The New York Times that Russian athletes had doped leading up to the 2008 Beijing Games, the 2012 London Games and throughout the course of the 2014 Sochi Games, when Russia controlled the Olympic testing laboratory. He described an overnight operation in which he and a small team had substituted Russian athletes’ tainted urine for clean urine, stockpiled in the months leading up to competition and passed surreptitiously through a hole in the wall of the lab building.

Reacting to that account, the IOC called a special meeting of its executive board, which convened by phone Tuesday. In a statement released after that call, the IOC addressed Rodchenkov’s claims, repeating its calls for the World AntiDoping Agency to initiate “a fully fledged investigation into allegations that testing at the Sochi Laboratory was subverted.”

On Tuesday, the IOC promised its cooperation with an investigation into the Sochi testing operation.

Separate of the IOC’s announcement, the Russian Weightlifting Federation announced that four Russian weight lifters, among them a world-record holder, had been suspended.

Alexei Lovchev, who won a world title in Houston in November with a world record total over two lifts, has been banned for four years after a positive test for the banned substance ipamorelin. His gold medal from the worlds is set to go to Lasha Talakhadze of Georgia, while his world record will be nullified, restoring a 16-year-old mark set by Iranian lifter Hossein Rezazadeh.

Russian weightlifters Alexei Kosov and Olga Afanasyeva were also banned for four years, while former European champion Olga Zubova was given an eightyear ban for a second offense. All three tested positive for steroids.