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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has threatened to exclude the sport of weightlifting from the 2024 Summer Olympics (Games of the XXXIII Olympiad) due to the rampant use of anabolic steroids seemingly endemic to the sport. The International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), the international governing body for Olympic weightlifting, must submit a “satisfactory report” on how it plans to rectify its steroid problem if it wants to avoid being banned from the 2024 Olympics.
IOC president Thomas Bach made his comments as the IOC Executive Board issued a press release announcing the event program for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. While weightlifting has been assured a spot in Tokyo, it has only been tentatively approved for 2024
“All must remain compliant with the Olympic Charter and the World Anti-Doping Code,” Bach said. “The International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) has until December 2017 to deliver a satisfactory report to the IOC on how they will address the massive doping problem this sport is facing.”
IOC President Bach’s threat may represent little more than grandstanding. After all, the mere delivery of a “report” by the IWF in the absence of any required concrete action is a very low bar to meet.
Nonetheless, Bach has shown that the IOC is serious by penalizing the IWF and weightlifting athletes in more subtle ways. For example, the IOC has reduced the “quota” of weightlifting athletes allowed to compete in Tokyo. The IOC eliminated an entire men’s weightlifting bodyweight category and effectively reduced the number of weightlifting athletes from 260 to only 196.
The IOC’s outrage over rampant steroid use in weightlifting comes after dozens of weightlifters were retroactively disqualified when they failed the reanalysis of their respective doping samples collected at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics.
The retroactive re-testing program resulted in a total of 98 potential anti-doping violations involving the use of prohibited substances in all Olympic sports. But weightlifting accounted for almost half of those positive drug test results with 49 weightlifters implicated.
Thirty of those weightlifters were Olympic medalists. Eleven women and 5 men were stripped of their medals from the 2008 Beijing Olympics while 10 women and 4 men were stripped of their medals from the 2012 London Olympics.
Most of the affected weightlifters were caught using stanozolol (Winstrol) and/or dehydrochloromethyltestosterone (Oral Turinabol). Many Olympic weightlifters apparently knew how to use Winstrol and Oral Turinabol in a manner that was undetectable by the anti-doping testing technology available back in 2008 and 2012.
But the introduction of a new anti-doping test in 2013 increased the detection window for stanozolol and dehydrochloromethyltestosterone from a couple of weeks to as long as six months. This was a game-changer for the anti-doping movement and resulted in literally hundreds of previously-undetectable steroid positives in Olympic and other elite amateur and professional sports.
The International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), the international governing body for Olympic weightlifting, had previously implemented measures that it hoped would keep the sport on the Olympic program for future Olympic Games. For example, the IWF instituted an automatic one-year ban for any country which has at least three weightlifters who fail Olympic reanalysis of stored samples. The “death penalty” has so far been used to punish several countries including Bulgaria, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The IWF is expected to deliver its report detailing new measures to combat the sport’s steroid problem to the IOC before the December 2017 deadline.
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