IOC to Ban Dozens of Athletes From Rio Olympics for Doping – Wall Street Journal

Dozens of athletes who competed in the Beijing Olympics are facing doping bans to prevent their participation in this summer’s Games in Rio de Janeiro, after samples from 2008 were recently retested, according to the International Olympic Committee.

The IOC said it would move to take immediate action against up to 31 athletes who competed in six sports in Beijing after retesting 454 doping samples from those Games. The identities of those athletes, who represented twelve nations, weren’t immediately known.

The results were the latest in a string of recent doping controversies, heightening concerns that performance-enhancing drug use is widespread while antidoping authorities scramble to investigate new claims. The World Anti-Doping Agency has said it would undertake investigations of recent claims of widespread doping by Russians at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, after a New York Times
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report last week outlined their methodology.

Also on Tuesday, the IOC said it would soon retest 250 doping samples from the 2012 London Olympics to root out athletes using performance-enhancing substances before the start of the Rio Games in less than three months. In the event medals are redistributed from the Beijing or London Games as a result of these retests, the IOC said it would also re-examine samples from athletes who stand to earn those medals.

“The retests from Beijing and London and the measures we are taking following the worrying allegations against the Laboratory in Sochi are another major step to protect the clean athletes irrespective of any sport or any nation,” said IOC president Thomas Bach, in a statement. “We keep samples for ten years so that the cheats know that they can never rest.”

Meanwhile, the Russian track and field federation is currently serving a provisional ban from international competition following a report from a WADA independent ethics committee found evidence of state-sponsored doping. The sport’s international governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, will vote on Russia’s eligibility to compete in the Rio Olympics at its council meeting next month.

Since sophisticated use of performance-enhancing drugs often outpaces development of drug tests, sports organizations allow for retesting of samples some years after competitions are completed to allow for testing science to catch up. WADA, whose international antidoping code is adopted by the IOC and many Olympic sports governing bodies, recently extended the statute of limitations on sample retesting from eight to 10 years after the sample’s collection.

Last year, the IAAF retested samples from the 2005 and 2007 world championships, yielding 28 athletes with adverse findings.

Write to Sara Germano at sara.germano@wsj.com