Eight Chinese athletes have been banned after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs during a crackdown ahead of the Beijing Olympics, state press reported yesterday.
Two of the athletes were with China’s national team, including wrestler Luo Meng and men’s swimmer Ouyang Kunpeng, whose lifetime ban was announced last week, the Titan Sports Weekly said.
Two coaches were also barred for life, including Ouyang’s coach Feng Shangbao and Luo’s trainer, who was not named, the paper said.
PHOTO: AP
Six other athletes at the provincial level — two divers, two track and field athletes, a weightlifter and a swimmer — have also tested positive for prohibited substances, it said.
The positive results turned up amid 5,000 drug tests administered by China since January, the paper said.
The six provincial athletes were banned from taking part in China’s National Games next year, it said.
Luo tested positive for using a banned diuretic. Diuretics are weight-loss substances which are sometimes used to mask performance-enhancing drugs.
Ouyang tested positive for clenbuterol, an anabolic steroid.
“Finding drug cheats is not an embarrassment to us. On the contrary, it says what a firm stance we take in the fight against doping,” Xinhua news agency quoted Yuan Hong, the head of China’s Olympic Committee Anti-Doping Commission, as saying.
“Ouyang’s ban proves nothing but our determination to weed out dope cheats among Chinese athletes. No matter how excellent an athlete is, he or she will be severely punished once tested positive,” Yuan said.
Only two of the other drug cheats were named, Zhang Jun and Gao Lin, both of the Hebei provincial diving team.
State media said the crackdown showed China’s determination to host a clean Beijing Olympics and rid its national team of drug cheats.
China’s sports administration was widely accused of institutionalized doping and officially condoning cheating after a string of positive doping tests in the 1990s, mainly among the country’s then world-beating swimmers.
Chinese track coach Ma Junren’s famed stable of distance runners also came under a cloud of drug suspicions after bursting onto the world scene with a series of titles at the 1993 World Championships.
Since being awarded to host August’s Beijing Olympics, China has worked to rid itself of the lingering taint of drugs.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier