Five more cheats kicked out for drug usage
Also yesterday, the International Weightlifting Federation suspended two more weightlifters who failed out-of-competition drugs tests.
Tests were done on all 260 weightlifters who qualified for the Olympics and the results will do nothing to assist the sport as it battles to keep its place in the Games.
Four years ago in Sydney, it was rocked by a series of scandals that led to the Bulgarian team being stripped of three medals and sent home. The sport was warned that it would be withdrawn from the Olympics if it did not clean up its act.
Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, who has taken a far harder stance on drugs cheats than some of his predecessors, praised the International Weightlifting Federation for testing their athletes as a matter of course before competition.
Mandatory tests were introduced before the Barcelona Games in 1992, but the sport is still notorious for its drug cheats.
IWF chief Tamas Ajan said a female athlete from Myanmar competing in the 48kg category and an Indian female athlete, whose weight category was not revealed, had tested positive to anabolic steroids and diuretics respectively.
It was not immediately clear whether the Myanmar athlete was the same one expelled from the Games last Monday after testing positive for a banned steroid.
"Weightlifting has to survive the present situation but we have to do everything to have a clean weightlifting sport," Ajan told reporters.
"The problem of doping spreads beyond weightlifting and can be centred around some foreign coaches who will go to different countries in order to make model competitors."
He added: "We could be digging our own grave."
At the 2003 world championships, 11 lifters from 10 nations tested positive including China's Shang Shichun, who broke three world records on the way to gold in the 75kg category.
Galabin Boevski, the Bulgarian Olympic champion, was subsequently banned for eight years for tampering with his urine sample. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Nick Britten
