The International Olympic Committee is taking another look at events around two Belarussian hammer throwers who were reinstated as 2008 Olympic medallists by the Court of Arbitration for Sport this month in a doping test case.
“We are in the process of going through the ruling,” German IOC vice-president Thomas Bach told German Press Agency DPA at executive board meetings in Lausanne.
“We are also looking into whether we can have the drug samples tested in another lab.” The CAS judges had ruled on June 10 that Vadim Devyatovskiy and Ivan Tsikhan are to receive back their silver and bronze medals, respectively, because the Beijing lab did not act according to testing rules when analysing their samples.
The athletes tested positive for testosterone after the Beijing competition and were stripped of their medals by the IOC. They appealed the ruling before CAS which spoke of “an unusually complex doping case.” CAS said that the athletes were not exonerated but that “the departures from the ISL (international standard of laboratories), which constitute mandatory procedural safeguards, justify the annulment of the tests’ results for both athletes.” CAS spoke of violations of the laboratory’s documentation and reporting requirements as well as of a not plausible explanation for the interruption of the automated testing procedure.
