Olympic gold medalist amongst 13 weightlifters in doping case

Olympic gold medalist Oxana Slivenko of Russia is one in every of 13 European weightlifters dealing with new fees over doping within the run-up to the London Games in 2012, the International Testing Agency mentioned Thursday.
The instances date from the European championships in April 2012, 4 months earlier than the Olympics, and comply with the ITA re-testing outdated samples utilizing trendy strategies. Of the 13 weightlifters from eight nations, 11 gained medals on the occasion in Turkey. They are all provisionally suspended till their instances are resolved.
Eight of the weightlifters have already served bans for breaking doping guidelines throughout their careers. Most are retired.

They embrace Slivenko, who was the gold medalist on the 2008 Olympics and gained gold with ease on the 2012 European championships. She withdrew shortly earlier than the London Olympics citing an harm.
Slivenko already served a doping-related ban from 2018 by way of 2020. The International Weightlifting Federation mentioned in March that she’s additionally accused in a separate doping matter associated to knowledge from the shuttered Moscow drug-testing laboratory.
Any weightlifters discovered to have doped on the 2012 European championships may be disqualified from that 12 months’s Olympics, but it surely wouldn’t have an effect on the medals. The solely two London Olympic medalists among the many 13 weightlifters charged by the ITA, Moldova’s Cristina Iovu and Romania’s Razvan Martin, have already been stripped of these medals for different doping offenses.
The ITA has been attempting to clear up weightlifting’s murky historical past of steroid use after an investigation final 12 months discovered ex-IWF president Tamas Ajan presided over a system by which doping instances had been lined up and over $10 million was unaccounted for.