Page 18 - ARUBA TODAY

A18
Wednesday 27 March 2019

IOC must

wield big SUNBURN

stick to

clean up

weightlifting

PARIS (AP) — No carrots. To
save weightlifting from the
rot of doping, the Interna-
tional Olympic Committee
must continue to wield the
big stick.
When initial drug testing
came back negative from
the most recent world
championships, it fleet-
ingly seemed that weight-
lifting might be starting to
turn a corner. Perhaps the
fight launched against
the sport's steroid culture,
laid bare by more than 50
positive tests from the 2008
and 2012 Olympic Games,
was bearing fruit? Maybe
IOC pressure and a vague
threat to possibly exclude
weightlifting from future
Olympic competition
had helped steer dopers
away from their needles
and pills? Wishful thinking.
When those world cham-
pionship drug-test samples
were then subjected to
deeper scrutiny using ad-
ditional laboratory analysis
and sophisticated com-
puter algorithms, a grim-
mer picture emerged that
shot holes in the notion of
a sport on the mend. The
follow-up testing snared at
least eight lifters , all from
Thailand, including three
who won world titles in
November and four oth-
ers who also won medals.
Two of them are Olympic
champions from the 2016
Rio Games, including one
who had previously been
banned for steroid use for Jazz cruise to a 125-92
two years. Clearly, then,
some lifters still aren’t get-
ting the message that be- victory despite Booker's 59
cause of systematic dop-
ing, they and their sport are
on a slippery slope toward Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker (1) goes to the basket as Utah Jazz forward Thabo Sefolosha (22) defends during the first half of
becoming an irrelevancy an NBA basketball game Monday, March 25, 2019, in Salt Lake City.
and a joke. Associated Press
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