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Believe it or not, doping is not limited to pro baseball players.
The athletes are barred from competing in the World Championships in Pyeongchang, South Korea and will face the IBU disciplinary panel once full lab results have been gathered.
The testing was done before a World Cup event in Ostersund, Sweden in December, according to the Associated Press.
Iourieva, Albina Akhatova and Dmitri Yaroshenko could each face a two-year ban, which would prevent them from competing in the 2010 Olympics.
"There is no, absolutely no excuse for what the three athletes and the people behind them have done," Besseberg said in a press-conference today. "We are here facing systematic doping by some athletes of one of the strongest teams. We have to ask ourselves if we caught them all now or if we have only seen the tip of the iceberg."
By testing and outing cheating athletes, the IBU aims to change their attitudes and those of their federations.
"We try to establish a sound and continuous anti-doping program. Just punishing athletes is not enough to change the underlying attitudes," Besseberg said.
As of January 1, the IBU has legal rights to retest athletes, which is something they could not do before.
With all the recent news of illegal drug use going on in the world of sports, my question is this: Have athletics gone past the point of no return?
Call me overdramatic and idealistic, but it seems that the purity of sport is being killed.
*photo from Wikipedia
What a shock, Russian athletes doping. The Rocky movie with the big russian clearly chronicles Russian training tactics.
ReplyDeleteOUTRAGEOUS! I love how every sport is no longer about the love, it's about the money, no matter what sport is played. Don't these athletes remember the days when they were younger and did it for themselves? Not a means to cheat themselves, their families and the people who follow them on a daily basis.
ReplyDeleteBaseball's doping is nothing compared with the Olympic sports. Track, cycling, power lifting -- it's all pretty filthy.
ReplyDeleteThis is true. I find it unfortunate that baseball players are the only ones that really get flack for doping when there's SO MUCH of it going on, especially in nations with reputations for power-house athletes like Russia...
ReplyDelete