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The IAAF has commenced
disciplinary action against 28 athletes over historic doping offences
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Twenty-eight athletes have been suspended over historic
doping offences, the International Association of Athletics Federations has
announced. The
world governing body, under fire in the wake of allegations of widespread
doping in the sport, said the retesting of anti-doping samples from the 2005
and 2007 World Championships in Helsinki and Osaka had turned up 32 adverse
findings from 28 athletes. The IAAF,
which has come out fighting in the wake of the accusations in the Sunday Times
and by German broadcaster ARD that it turned a blind eye to mass doping, said
it could not name the athletes concerned "due to the legal process".
The Press Association
report continues:
It said: "A large
majority of the 28 are retired, some are athletes who have already been
sanctioned, and only very few remain active in sport. The IAAF is provisionally
suspending them and can confirm that none of the athletes concerned will be
competing in Beijing."
This year's World Championships
get under way in the Chinese capital a week on Saturday.
The IAAF said that from
April this year it had, using the latest anti-doping technology , again
retested samples from Helsinki and Osaka. It pointed out this reanalysis had
commended well before the latest allegations against the governing body.
The IAAF said these
samples had been "proactively stored" at the Swiss Laboratory for
Doping Analyses (LAD), the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory in
Lausanne.
It said it had already,
in 2012, conducted a first round of reanalysis of urine samples taken from
Helsinki, which had led to six adverse findings.
Before Tuesday's
announcement, nine athletes in total had been sanctioned following retesting of
samples from various World Championships.
The IAAF said in a
statement: "The IAAF embarked on this long-term storage and retesting
strategy in 2005 to ensure that clean athletes are ultimately rewarded for
their honest efforts in IAAF competitions. The IAAF is committed to use every
means at its disposal within the world anti-doping code to root out the cheats,
however long it takes."
The IAAF said it would
re-allocate medals where necessary should doping offences be confirmed.
The IAAF has been accused
of not following up suspicious blood test results from hundreds of athletes,
including major medal winners, in allegations based on the expert analysis of
leaked data relating to 12,000 blood tests conducted on more than 5,000
athletes.
The claims threaten the
already fragile reputation of the sport rocked by repeated drug scandals and
have been vehemently denied by the governing body.
Lord Coe, who is standing
for the presidency of the IAAF, branded the allegations a "declaration of
war" on athletics, but the two experts who analyzed the leaked data,
Michael Ashenden and Robin Parisotto, have stood by their views and WADA
announced an urgent investigation into the claims.
London Marathon chief
executive Nick Bitel also hit out at the IAAF, while some athletes have also
made public their anger, with Olympic discus champion Robert Harting leading a
group of German athletes in criticizing the organization in an online video.
Harting said: "Dear
IAAF, we cannot trust you anymore."
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