Speedskaters representing Russian Olympic Committee work out during a practice session at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson) |
The 2,900 or so competitors at the Winter Games have to make
themselves available for unannounced doping control visits, putting them at
greater risk of catching COVID-19 and possibly ruling them out of their event.
The International Testing Agency, which oversees sample
collection at the Olympics, said Wednesday the daily tests, which everyone in
the Olympic bubble must do, add extra psychological weight and uncertainty.
“There is a lot of attention when they go through the doping
control process to go through all the COVID measures,” said Matteo Vallini, the
ITA head of testing. “It puts them under pressure.”
The ITA, which designed the Olympic athlete testing, and
World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees the rules and the testing laboratory
in Beijing, detailed their plans on the first day of competition, two days
before the opening ceremony.
OMICRON CHALLENGES
The wave of COVID-19 cases caused by the recent omicron
variant has added to the ITA’s work.
Late and unpredictable team selections because of athletes
testing positive meant their replacements were less of a priority in
pre-Olympic testing plans.
The agency said Wednesday it still hit a target of about 80%
collected of the 5,400 samples recommended to sports bodies.
The ITA and WADA draw confidence in hoping for a clean
Olympics after more tests were done on athletes training in 2021 away from
their competitions than in the last pre-pandemic year of 2019.
There were only four positive doping tests at the 2018
Pyeongchang Olympics, though all samples taken four years ago are in storage.
They can be re-analyzed until 2028 if new testing methods or intelligence
emerge.
RUSSIA RELATIONS
This year’s Olympics are likely the last where Russian
athletes are not allowed to compete under their country’s name and without its
flag and anthem.
In Beijing, as at the Summer Games in Tokyo six months ago,
they will officially represent ROC and gold medalists will hear an excerpt from
a Tchaikovsky piano concerto while standing on the podium.
Those World Anti-Doping Agency sanctions expire in December,
two years after being imposed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
“The chapter is coming to an end,” WADA director general
Olivier Niggli said Wednesday. “We are still remaining very vigilant.”
WADA’s case was against the Russian anti-doping agency,
known as RUSADA. A key step to re-establishing it in international sports was
electing a new leader two months ago.
“We were very pleased with that,” Niggli said of the process
to appoint Veronika Loginova, who used to work for Russia’s sports ministry.
“We certainly at the moment think that RUSADA is operating independently and we
see no sign of undue interference.”
There are still pending disciplinary cases for sports
governing bodies related to the 2014 Sochi Olympics using evidence gathered
from the Moscow testing laboratory.
“There are still quite a number of them that are (not) dealt
with,” Niggli said.
The 212-member Russian team has been the most tested in the
pre-Olympic program.
BEIJING LABORATORY
The WADA-accredited laboratory at Beijing Sports University
will analyze about 2,900 blood and urine samples during the Olympics.
It’s a different lab from the one in the city that had past
issues with Olympic and pre-Olympic testing.
Errors during the 2008 Beijing Olympics at the National
Anti-Doping Laboratory led to two hammer throwers from Belarus regaining their
medals at CAS after being disqualified for testing positive for testosterone.
In 2016, WADA shut down the same lab for the four months
prior to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics for mistakes in analyzing samples.
Now, the lab is part of a university instead of China’s
anti-doping agency — a situation Niggli said “is always better because we like
labs to be involved in research.”
“They have progressed a lot. We have no particular worries
with the lab,” he said.
Niggli is sure there can be no repeat of the systematic
sample-swapping in Sochi’s lab.
“The situation is different,” he said. “There is a lot of
safeguards in there.” -AP
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