Here we are again, talking about doping and wondering to ourselves…. will our sport ever been clean?
I’m not sure about you, but I’m sick to death of hearing about athletes being caught for doping and weightlifting being the ‘poster boy’ for drug use.
So, what is this latest uproar about and why are we concerned? Well, this time round it centres on Georgian Athlete and Son of the National Head Coach Giorgi Tchintcharauli (Asanidze), Kakhi Asanidze testing positive for SARMs in July 2023. If you haven’t heard of SARMs, or like us, you’ve had your head in the sand with regards to PEDs, hoping all your favourite athletes are clean as a whistle, hop over to our ‘What are SARMS’ page for a more detailed break down of why an athlete might be caught doping with these particular banned substances.
Why is the banning of this particular athlete a concern? That all links back to our investment in the longevity of the sport and it’s presence at the Olympic Games. Weightlifting has a notorious history with drug use, something that is not lost on the International Olympic Committee (IOC). As such, sanctions between the delayed Tokyo Games in 2021 and the upcoming Paris Olympics in 2024 have been put in place, most notably… nations with three doping violations between these two games face losing some or all of the olympic quota spots (for more info on this see here). But why does it feel as if SARMS have jumped onto the weightlifting scene out of no where? The truth of the matter is that they were first developed back in the 1940’s and became popular with athletes around the late 90’s, but testing for them has only really recently begun….
In the hundreds of historic sanctions listed on the International Weightlifting Federation’s (IWF) website, dating back to 2003, SARMS is not mentioned once under the “substance” column. Since the last lift in the Tokyo Games in August 2021, there have been 37 adverse analytical findings announced by the International Testing Agency (ITA), which now handles all anti-doping procedures for the IWF – and 13 of them have been for SARMS.
Brian Oliver, Inside the Games
There are currently 3 types of anti-doping tests: Urine, venous blood, and dried blood spot. As drugs move over to the banned list, the International Testing Agency (ITA) adds testing for them to their ‘package’ for doping control. As certain PEDs become more popular or more widely used or notable amongst athletes, the governing bodies start testing for them with more scrutiny. Notably at the 2022 British Championships, 37 year old Giuseppe Aschettino, a Masters athlete from Northern Ireland, was found to be positive for ligandrol (SARMS LGD-4033) for the first time. At the recent British Seniors in Manchester 2023, both Urine and Blood samples were taken for doping control. The cost for this testing lies with British Weightlifting. For the IWF, the same happens at the international competition. They have a budget for testing, and they then select the ‘package’ of what they want to test. It would appear that until 2021, SARMs was not something that was tested for. What we need to bear in mind when considering the financial burden of doping control on the governing bodies is, this isn’t just testing at comps. This is all year-round random & whereabouts testing of athletes and as such, the cost of these tests is a large portion of their budget. So not only are athletes who dope ruining the sport from a competitive angle, but they are also crippling federations by forcing them to pay for expensive PED testing.
So, back to the positive test result of Kakhi Asanidze and why this is important. After the provisional ban of Anton Pliesnoi, in December 2021, Kakhi’s provisional ban will counts as a possible 2nd separate doping instances against Georgia. So that then poses the question, if one more Georgian gets caught, could we see the entire Georgian team miss the Paris Olympics and the unthinkable of Lasha not lifting? We saw this at the delayed Tokyo Olympics when the Romanian, Thai, Malaysian and Egyptian weightlifting teams were all barred from competing, meaning the big names of Toma and Mohamed Ehab were missing.
It really is that simple, with the trend of athletes being caught doping with whereabouts testing and the IWF ramping up doping control exponentially over the last year, the likelihood is we may well see some nations excluded from the Paris olympic qualifiers and indeed from the games themselves. For every athlete that gets caught, the knock-on effect to the wider sport and for everyone else is catastrophic.
To confound matters even more, with all this going on prior to Paris 2024, as of today (22/08/23), weightlifting is still not included as a sport for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The IOC have said that there is “a pathway for boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon to be potentially included in the LA28 Initial Sports Programme at the IOC Session in 2023.”. For weightlifting, this pathway inevitably means stepping up the doping tests and making it as clean as possible. So we need to prepare ourselves for more athletes being caught and the distinct possibility of not only athlete bans, but country bans as well.
Do we actually think that we wont see Lasha lift at the olympics? The answer is simply “no we don’t”. While Pliesnoi was caught with a positive test in 2021, they still haven’t resolved this case and we cannot find him on any WADA/IOC/ITA banned athlete list. So technically, this means that Georgia still doesn’t have any banned athletes as Kakhi’s ban is still provisional as well. This, of course means that Georgia are ‘clean’.
While this is probably good news for Paris 2024, this still leaves the guillotine of doubt firmly hanging perilously over the head of the 2028 Olympic Games for weightlifting. If doping violations can’t be resolved quickly and effectively, how are the sports governing bodies ever going to keep on top of it? Or are the proposed changes, being announced later in the year by the IWF, already a precursor to the acceptance that weightlifting will lose its place at the Olympics and its now life after the divorce that we should focus on?
Whatever happens in the next 12 months, it surely will be a defining moment for the sport that we love so dearly.
