Hoketsu would have become the oldest athlete to compete at the Olympics had he qualified for Rio, overtaking Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn, who participated in the 1920 Antwerp Games at the age of 72.
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The IOC and WADA joined together to take “additional measures to protect the clean athletes”, by taking a second look at drug samples previously taken from athletes who will start at the 2016 Olympics, per request of IOC president and Olympic champion Thomas Bach.
Implicated individuals could face lifelong bans from the Olympics.
The IOC has also announced that they’ve re-tested 250 samples from the 2012 London Olympics, and results will be coming “shortly”.
The International Olympic Committee leader also stepped up calls on Russian Federation to clear up accusations of interference in testing at its doping laboratory during the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.
The IOC has instructed its lab in Lausanne to re-examine samples from Sochi “using the most modern and efficient methods at its disposal”.
The Russian sports ministry said Wednesday it supports banning drug cheats but claimed it would be unfair to keep a blanket ban on all track athletes for the games.
The International Olympic Committee made the announcement after retesting 454 doping samples from the 2008 Beijing games.
Disciplinary proceedings against the undisclosed athletes from 12 countries and six sports have been opened, the International Olympic Committee said.
If those tests also come back positive, the International Olympic Committee can issue provisional suspensions.
Russian Federation is already at the heart of the biggest doping scandal in sport, with its track and field athletes suspended as a result of an investigation into allegations of widespread doping and their participation at this year’s Rio Olympics in doubt.
The world of sports needs a unified system of fighting against abuse of performance enhancing drugs in light of recently frequent doping scandals, Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko said on Wednesday.
Meldonium, proving to have been widely used by elite Russian athletes prior to its ban, was originally developed to improve the endurance of Russian soldiers operating in low-atmosphere environments, and has also been marketed as a heart medicine.
Bach said if any medalist was among those 31 there will not be an automatic reallocation of medals without those athletes being retested first.
Earlier the New York Times reported of alleged tampering with urine samples done during the Sochi Olympics by anti-doping experts and intelligence agents.
He says “I don’t know where these athletes come from”.
The New York Times reported that the same USA attorney’s office that investigated the Federation Internationale de Football Association corruption case is looking into the doping scandal.
Thomas Bach, the OIC’s president, said he would enforce the organization’s zero-tolerance policy, even if reports of state-sponsored doping by the Russians are borne out.
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French prosecutors have said that 2.8 million Singapore dollars ($2 million) was apparently transferred from Japan to the Singapore account of a company called Black Tidings.
