Chinese athletes found to have used performance-enhancing drugs are to receive criminal punishments and jail terms from next year, as China cracks down on doping ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, state media reported.
China’s General Administration of Sport and top judicial authority are drafting rules that would apply criminal law to doping cases, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.
Citing remarks made at a meeting by sport administration Director Gou Zhongwen, Xinhua said that the new anti-doping punishments would be put into effect “probably in early 2019.”
“It is our will to show the world we are really serious about anti-doping and are taking concrete measures on fight against doping,” Gou said.
The sport administration told reporters it could not confirm Xinhua’s report.
Doping scandals have riddled China’s international sporting record in the past decade, with some athletes stripped of Olympic gold medals.
In January last year, three Chinese women’s weightlifting gold medalists at the 2008 Beijing Olympics were disqualified and stripped of their medals for doping following a reanalysis of their drug tests.
Later that year, a Chinese doctor in an interview with German media claimed that there had been a systematic doping program in China during the 1980s and 1990s across a range of sports.
All medals won by Chinese athletes at major international tournaments in the past two decades of the 20th century are tainted by doping, whistle-blower Xue Yinxian said.
This year, China banned several of its own athletes who were found to have used performance-enhancing drugs, as Beijing works to clean up its international sporting reputation.
In January, a Chinese speed skater was handed a two-year ban and struck off the national team ahead of the Pyeongchang Games in South Korea.
That same month, China’s national marathon champion and Olympian Wang Jiali was banned for eight years after failing a drug test, her second violation.
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