“They passed that stress test and the lab has been performing superbly”.
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International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said there would be no place to hide for drugs cheats before the Games and the organisation’s medical and scientific director, Richard Budgett, said the process of testing has been more thorough than ever.
“They ask us to come to work really early and then hold us back when it’s time to go home”, she says.
Dozens of Russian athletes, including virtually the entire track and field team, were suspended as part of sanctions against the country of its systematic state-backed doping programme that also included the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.
Before the games kicked off, officials selected 50,000 volunteers to do everything from directing fans to venues to driving Olympic officials around.
Only authorised personnel, in pairs, can enter the freezer to access samples, he said.
“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.
“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”.
“At the time we thought we had great expertise in place.but it is hard when the director of the laboratory is involved. Lessons have been learned”. More than 4,000 samples are being collected in Rio. “The message for all those cheats out there is ‘beware you will be caught'”.
Budgett said there are already 1,400 samples from Beijing 2008 and London 2012 retested and 98 samples returned positive results.
So far three athletes have tested positive for banned substances at the Games.
A test for gene doping would also be used in a matter of months after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) approved it recently.
A new test has been developed in Australia to detect if cheats are injecting synthetic genes which cause the body to produce more of the naturally-occurring hormone EPO, which in turn boosts the body’s ability to carry more oxygen in its blood.
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But that may not be the end of the story and about 6,000 tests, both urine and blood, will be stored by the International Olympic Committee for a decade to allow for re-testing, using new technology, and the detection of substances that were not yet known at the time.
