Rio de Janeiro, Aug 16: A total of 3,188 biological material samples have been tested for the objective of doping control since the opening of the Olympic Village a week ahead of the Rio Games, the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) medical director has said.
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Budgett, a Briton who won a rowing gold at the 1984 Olympics, gave no details of the mistake the cost the lab its accreditation, but the head of the facility said in July there had been problems with the implementation of new equipment.
Global experts were also present inside the facility at the remote five-storey building on the island campus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, along with observers, to make sure the process is executed correctly.
“We take it extremely seriously”, Budgett said.
“All of us fighting for clean athletes were deeply shocked and felt betrayed by what had happened [in Sochi]”, Budgett said here today.
They are not linked to the tests now being conducted in Rio.
Strict security measures have been introduced at the anti-doping laboratory here, he revealed, from the National Guard and private firms. “I get the footage of the door of the freezer”, he said. “That will be a month’s worth of footage of surveillance of the freezer”.
“The whole thing is very carefully controlled”, Budgett said.
In addition, officials are using new doping control kits that should be tamper proof, he said.
The IOC was criticised for not banning all Russian athletes after the McLaren report claimed Russia operated a state-sponsored doping programme across multiple sports.
McLaren’s report which was based largely on testimony from former Russian anti-doping lab director Grigory Rodchenkov prompted calls for Russia to be banned entirely from the Rio Games.
“Of course, we look at ourselves and wonder how we could have done better in Sochi”, Budgett said. “Lessons have been learned”. More than 4,000 samples are being collected in Rio.
The IOC will store all the samples from the Olympic Games for 10 years and retest them as soon as a reliable new method is in place.
No further positive cases have been recorded in the final two rounds of retesting of stored samples from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2012 London Games, Budgett said.
“There was a special task force [here] for the first time – funded by $500,000 by the IOC run by WADA using national anti-doping operations from all five continents – to actually look at the athletes about to come to the Games, see what programme of testing they were undergoing, identifying any gaps, plug those gaps with the help of global federations and national anti-doping organisations”. Six athletes have been formally disqualified and stripped of medals so far.
A test for gene doping would also be used in a matter of months after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) approved it recently.
“With the test you can actually tell if the EPO gene is in the wrong place”.
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“The lab passed a very intensive stress test by WADA (prior to the Games)”.
