IOC will retest drug samples from 2008 Beijing Olympics

IOC wants to double-check drug tests and catch cheaters from 2008 Olympics

It’s been six and a half years since the Beijing Olympics, but the IOC still wants to catch cheaters from that event.

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The IOC (International Olympic Committee) says that they plan to re-test drug samples from the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, looking for performance-enhancing drugs. The committee plans to re-test hundreds of samples from the event.

According to an Associated Press story, IOC medical director Richard Budgett said that re-tests have already been done on stored samples from Beijing, as well as the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and the 2012 London Olympics.

“Even if it’s five or 10 years later, it’s really an important thing to do,” Budgett told the AP. “It’s not ideal. You want to do it as close as possible to the time, but if you’ve got no option but to do it later, then that’s what you have to do.”

The statute of limitations on athletes caught doping is ten years, giving the committee until 2018 to catch anyone violating drug rules in the Beijing Olympics.

How many samples will be re-tested?

“It will be in the hundreds. Who knows what tests are going to be developed over the next two years? It makes a lot of sense to wait another couple of years for the majority,” Budgett told the AP.

Athletes caught could be stripped of their medals, even this many years after winning them.

The IOC has been leading the charge against athletes doping, starting the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999. Athletes have been penalized for performance-enhancing drugs in the Olympics since the early 1990s, when evidence was found of cheating among East German teams in the ’70s.

It may seem odd to be going back this late to see if anyone was cheating in the Olympics. But it took until 2005 for baseball fans and media members to really figure out what was going on in the 1990s, so this is pretty much par for the course.

If anything, it shows that the IOC is serious about stopping doping. It’s been almost seven years; if all they were worried about was the public outlook, they could easily just let all this go. But they want to go back and find out, which suggests this isn’t just a PR stunt–they’re very serious.

Whatever happens, this will not be a short process; it will take a while for us to find out the fruits of all this drug testing.

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