PARIS (AP) — The days are over when Olympic organizers and anti-doping officials would typically predict “the cleanest Games ever.” Not at the Paris Olympics.
“It’s not our role to do it,” World Anti-Doping Agency President Witold Bańka said Thursday.
“It’s not that now we want to assure that every single athlete is clean. We do not,” Bańka said at the agency’s pre-Games news conference. “It’s obvious that you will never eliminate doping from the sporting landscape.
“You will always find someone who wants to cheat.”
The lesson of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2012 London Games is that it can take years to judge how clean or dirty it was.
Dozens of medals were stripped and athletes disqualified years after those competitions, in large part because more advanced testing could be used on samples.
The samples taken in Paris will be stored and can be retested until 2034 in a program run by the International Testing Agency, the operational wing of the global anti-doping system based in the Olympic home city of Lausanne, Switzerland.
“Our role is to oversee the system,” Bańka said of Montreal-based WADA, “to make sure the system is robust, to make sure that we are using all the existing tools to test athletes properly.
“And not to tell you that the Games are going to be totally clean and you will not have even one single positive test,” said the 39-year-old former 400-meter runner from Poland.
WADA took one track and field athlete out of the Paris Olympics on Thursday, after winning an appeal hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne.
CAS judges imposed a two-year ban on Romanian long jumper Florentina Iusco, who had tested positive last year for a banned diuretic, furosemide. WADA used its right to challenge doping verdicts worldwide after a Romanian tribunal decided she was not at fault and issued only a reprimand.
Bańka said Thursday the program overseen by the ITA took 87,000 samples from potential Olympic athletes in March to June. The best-in-class operator is likely track and field’s Athletics Integrity Unit.
“Our focus has been that the Olympics and Paralympic Games are protected,” Bańka said, “and the athletes are afforded a level playing field that they deserve.”
Not all athletes have full confidence in that goal.
“No. Not really,” seven-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Caeleb Dressel said Thursday when asked about the case of 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive ahead of the Tokyo Olympics but were never suspended. WADA accepted a Chinese theory of accidental contamination from a hotel kitchen.
“I don’t really think they’ve given us enough evidence to support them in how this case was handled,” Dressel said at a news conference where he shared a platform with World Aquatics leaders and other top athletes.
Skepticism also followed recent reports of athletes — British taekwondo Olympic champion Jade Jones and U.S. weightlifter Wes Kitts — avoiding bans in cases that might have kept them from competing in Paris.
“Sometimes the decisions that are taken,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli acknowledged, “are not easy to understand for the public.”
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
By GRAHAM DUNBAR
AP Sports Writer