Romanian weightlifter Florin Croitoru has tested positive for three banned substances and has been disqualified from the 2012 London Olympic Games, insidethegames.biz first reported on Tuesday.
In addition to Croitoru, insidethegames.biz also reported on Monday that weightlifters Ruslan Nurudinov of Uzbekistan and Mikalai Novikau of Belarus have also been disqualified from London 2012 due to doping violations and are facing potential bans from the IWF. They were provisionally suspended in December and await an official IWF ruling. The details for each athlete’s disqualification from their retests at the 2012 London Olympics are below.
- Croitoru’s samples from the London Olympics were reevaluated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and came back positive with three substances including: metenolone, stanozol, and dehydrochlormethyltestosterone.
- Nurudinov, who most recently and notably won a gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, tested positive for dehydrochlormethyltestosterone.
- Novikau tested positive for dehydrochlormethyltestosterone and stanozolol.
Croitoru’s ninth place finish in the men’s -56kg class at the 2012 London Games will no longer stand, and he becomes the 55th weightlifter to test positive during the re-evaluation and re-testing of samples from the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2012 Games. In 2013, the 25-year old earned a gold medal at the European Championships due to all of the three medalists ahead of him — Valentin Hristov, Igor Bour, and Zulfugar Suleymanovwere — getting suspended following the Championships for doping.
On the topic of anti-doping news, earlier this month, the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) and the International Testing Agency (ITA) signed an anti-doping partnership agreement at the SportAccord convention in Queensland, Australia. This partnership was struck to further solidify and hone in on the importance of promoting and requiring clean weightlifting across the world.
Since that agreement, however, new doping scandals have surfaced including a report that cited more than 10 Indian weightlifters were asked to leave their national team’s training camp after testing positive for performance enhancement drugs.
Feature image from Jasminko Ibrakovic / Shutterstock.
