WADA re-testing Beijing, London Olympic winners’ samples

Aman Sood

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Tribune News Service

Patiala, April 3

The 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2012 London Olympics medal winners, including from India, are under the scanner after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has planned to retest hundreds of samples in a bid to catch “any drug cheats who escaped detection” at that time.

The retesting opens the possibility of athletes being stripped of Olympic medals up to 10 years after they won them in case their samples test possible for any banned substance under the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) banned list.

The move to retest comes following some medical and technical improvement in detection of banned substance from the samples collected during the past few years and also due to the intelligence inputs received by IOC.

Confirming this, IOC medical director Richard Budgett said that some retests have already been carried out on stored samples from Beijing, the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and the 2012 London Olympics.

Retesting opens the possibility of athletes being stripped of Olympic medals up to 10 years after they won them. The International Olympic Committee has stored samples since 2004 at a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, keeping them for reanalysis when new methods become available. The original eight-year statute of limitations has been extended to 10 years under the new World Anti-Doping Code, meaning the IOC can retest Beijing samples up to 2018.

IOC media relations manager Andrew Mitchell said “The programme of reanalysis is designed to enhance the deterrent effect of testing at the Olympic Games and to ensure that every possibility is taken to detect athletes who cheat. The IOC keeps all samples collected during the Olympic Games for ten years (recently extended from 8 years under the new World Anti-Doping Code) to allow for retesting, should new methods become available,” he said.

“This is not a blanket retesting but a careful and considered selection of samples based on intelligence gathered over the previous ten years on the emergence of any new illegal substances previously unknown, and on any new drugs testing techniques that have been developed in that time,” he stated.

Mitchell, in an exclusive interaction with The Tribune, said that a small number of samples have been re-analysed from Beijing, Vancouver and London based on specific intelligence on athletes and possible doping practices. “The majority of samples are analysed near to the end of the statute of limitations in order to increase the chances of benefiting from new and more sensitive methods of detection,” he said.

IOC officials said a small number of total 4,000 samples from Beijing have already been retested based on intelligence about suspected cheaters, with no positive tests confirmed so far but a “significant number of samples will be reanalyzed in the coming months” from the athletes who could compete in next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.