China faces a one-year ban from int'l weightlifting competitions after three of its athletes were stripped of their 2008 Olympic Gold Medals on Thursday following re-tests of samples from the Beijing Games. The IOC said that it had disqualified weightlifting Gold Medalists Cao Lei (75kg), Chen Xiexia (48 kg) and Liu Chunhong (69kg) from the Beijing Games after they "tested positive for prohibited substances." Lifters from Taiwan, Russia and Kazakhstan could be upgraded to the Gold Medals, "although it is unclear if they too failed doping tests in the re-analysis." The Int'l Weightlifting Federation said last year that countries with three or more failed drugs tests in the re-tests of Beijing and London would be banned for a year from all int'l competitions (REUTERS, 1/12).
Olympic Gold Medalist Callum Skinner said that the controversy over therapeutic use exemptions is a "distraction in the fight against doping in sport." The 24-year-old cyclist was one of the athletes whose use of TUEs was leaked by hackers "Fancy Bears." TUEs allow the use of "otherwise banned substances if athletes have a genuine medical need." Skinner: "TUEs have started to gain a bit of a bad name for something that is really about athlete welfare. We're generally getting a bit distracted by TUEs. We have far bigger challenges in terms of anti-doping with out-of-competition testing" (BBC, 1/13).
