Weightlifting is buckling under the burden of a drug-taking culture that has made it one of the most notorious Olympic events.
The sport that first appeared at the Olympics in 1896 accounted for 48 of the 104 positive tests detected in new analyses on samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 in London.
It could get worse as not all the results of the 1,243 samples have been revealed.
Top of the sorry list was Kazakhstan’s Ilya Ilyin, a four-time weightlifter of the year who was stripped of his Beijing and London 94kg titles.
The London 94kg podium has been devastated by doping.
Russia’s Alexandr Ivanov has had to hand in his silver medal and Anatoly Ciricu of Moldova his bronze.
The doping merry-go-round is now so farcical that Saeid Mohammadpour of Iran, who came fifth, is now in line for gold.
The bronze medal could go to Tomasz Zielinksi of Poland who came ninth on the day.
“Weightlifting is clearly a sport at high risk of doping,” said Olivier Niggli, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
“This was clearly proved by the number of cases detected by the International Weightlifting Federation with WADA at the 2015 world championships in Houston and by the retesting of analyses by the International Olympic Committee.”
The IWF barred serial performance-enhancing offenders Russia and Bulgaria from competing at the Rio Games. The IWF said that Russia’s test results were “shocking”.
It adopted a resolution in June that said any country which returns three or more positive drugs tests from the reanalysis of samples from the last two Olympics would be suspended for a year.
But the IOC is keeping a close eye on the sport, according to experts close to the Olympic movement.
“Weightlifting’s problems are nothing new,” said Jean-Loup Chappelet, a professor at the IDHEAP Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration at the University of Lausanne.
