(ATR) There are 17 Olympic athletes who have in the past few days become medalists, thanks to retesting of doping samples from Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
Seven of the 12 athletes named as dopers by the IOC on Monday had won medals in London while 10 of the 16 revealed last Thursday were on the podium in Beijing.
The majority of the 28 have two things in common. The first is that they are weightlifters. There were nine weightlifters in the 12 positives from London and nine from the 16 positives from Beijing. Of the total of 18, 11 had won weightlifting medals during those Games.
The second commonality has to do with the countries the athletes represent. All 12 of the positives from London came from athletes who competed for either Russia or a former Soviet republic. Chrysopigi Devetzi of Greece, who won bronze in woman’s triple jump, was the only one of the 16 athletes named from Beijing who was not from either Russia or a former Soviet republic.
The numbers are even more telling if you add in the eight athletes from the London Games who were named on October 27. All of them were from Russia or a former Soviet republic and six of them, including five medalists, were weightlifters.
An example of the prevalence of positive doping results in weightlifting is the men's 94kg category from London. Ilya Ilyin of Kazakhstan (gold), Alexandr Ivanov of Russia (silver) and Anatoli Ciricu of Moldova (bronze) have all failed retests along with the weightlifters who finished fourth, sixth and seventh. If all the results stand, the podium would eventually consist of the fifth, eighth and ninth place finishers.
The latest round of results is only adding to an already lengthy number of positive doping retests from the previous two Summer Games.
The IOC had revealed on July 22 that 98 athletes had tested positive for banned substances from the first and second waves of reanalysis. At least 23 of the athletes were medalists, all from Beijing. At that time, the IOC did not reveal the number of medalists from London who had failed retesting.
The final two rounds of reanalysis were to take place during and after the Rio Games. With at least 45 athletes already stripped of their medals, the IOC must be hoping that the end of the process is close at hand.
Written by Gerard Farek
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