Weightlifting Federation Working to Clean Up the Sport

(ATR) The International Weightlifting Federation executive board is briefed by groups working to bring its suspended member federations back into the fold.

The executive board met for two days in Colorado Springs, United States, to discuss updates to clean sport recommendations given to the IOC last year. The IOC executive board had pressured the IWF into implementing reforms after numerous anti-doping rule violations were discovered in Beijing and London Olympic retests. The sport’s spot in the 2024 Summer Olympics was no long guaranteed pending reforms.

Nine countries were banned for one year by the IWF for repeated doping violations: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Turkey, and Ukraine. These countries were suspended from the 2017 World Championships in the United States and the federation has noted the geographic cluster of the violators.

"To change culture, first you must have a sense of urgency," Tamas Ajan, IWF President said in a statement following the meeting. "The IOC’s deadlines and our suspensions of member federations have created that urgency. Changing culture also requires a broad coalition of people to make the change: working in partnership with the IOC, with WADA and the national anti-doping organizations, and with our own federations, coaches and athletes, we have this coalition also. All the ingredients for change have been put in place, so it is no surprise to see the change actually happening."

Next month a new anti-doping policy will be put in place by the IWF upon recommendation of the federation’s clean sport commission. Now, a monitoring group will continue to follow up with each of the suspended federations introducing the guidelines each must adopt to have suspensions lifted.

"The IWF is determined to do all it can to protect clean lifters, and I am very pleased by the way the whole Executive Board has been engaged with this important work," Ajan added. "Over the past several years, the IWF has radically improved the way it deals with the historic problem of doping, which mainly concerned a limited number of countries where there was a broader culture of doping."

The IWF executive also heard a presentation on the IOC-approved Tokyo 2020 qualification system, and discussed the potential for an educational seminar with the World Anti-Doping Agency in Moscow later this year.

Written by Aaron Bauer

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