In search of credibility after a cascade of doping and corruption scandals, weightlifting will play from Saturday, during the Tokyo Games, its future on the Olympic program, scrutinized like no other sport by all authorities.
"
The situation is becoming more and more serious,
" warned the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach at the end of February, in the face of the stagnation of this forceful discipline already practiced in Antiquity.
If weightlifting continues to align the controversial leaders and the podiums reshaped to the rhythm of the positive tests, the IOC will have to "
look into its place in the program of the 2024 Paris Olympics and future Olympics
", threatened the boss of the organization .
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Such an ouster would be historic: not only was weightlifting present from the first Games of the modern era, in Athens in 1896, but the IOC has not sanctioned a sport in this way since football in 1932 and tennis in 1932. 1924 to 1988, for having transgressed the then primordial rule of amateurism. Even boxing, which has been accumulating financial drifts and controversial arbitration for several years, has benefited from a tailor-made solution. The IOC withdrew from the International Federation the organization of its own Olympic tournament, but maintained the discipline in Tokyo. There is no guarantee that weightlifting will have this type of arrangement. Highly developed in Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East, it is not very popular anywhere else,and offers a stark contrast to the young and spectacular sports prized by the IOC.
The "culture of corruption"
Even if the Japanese tournament goes off without a hitch (from July 24 to August 4), the body has already decided to reduce the quotas for Paris 2024, eliminating four events and increasing the weightlifters engaged to 120, against 196 in Tokyo and 260 in Rio 2016. The decline was therefore initiated when an investigation by the German channel ARD came in January 2020 to expose the "
culture of corruption
" plaguing the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), to hide the massive use of doping.
Five months later, Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren issued a damning report for the IWF and its ex-boss, Hungarian Tamas Ajan, citing the "
cover-up
»40 positive doping controls.
At the end of October, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in turn revealed the cheating of 18 weightlifters from six countries, suspected of having provided false urine samples with the complicity of "
substitutes
", athletes resembling them.
110 doping cases at the Games alone
Finally, the young International Testing Agency (ITA), which took over the IWF's anti-doping program in 2019 under pressure from the IOC, has just launched disciplinary proceedings against Tamas Ajan, Romanian Vice-President Nicolae Vlad and President from the European Federation, the Turk Hassan Akkus. Because weightlifting is not only distinguished by its mountain of positive cases: 110 at the Games, or more than a quarter of the Olympic total in all sports, resulting in the withdrawal of 49 medals, according to an AFP count. It is impossible to target a single federation since these anabolic steroids, which promote muscle mass gain, concern 33 countries. In recent years, the IWF has had to suspend Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Turkey andUkraine. It also deprived of the Tokyo Olympics Thailand, Egypt, Malaysia and most recently Romania.
Added to this endemic cheating are the shenanigans of former leaders. The ITA demonstrates direct interventions to allow Romanian Roxana Cocos to win silver at the London 2012 Olympics while under double suspension, or to cover 23 anti-doping rule violations among Azerbaijanis, and 17 among the Turks. If the resignation of Tamas Ajan in April 2020 was well received by the authorities, the IWF rekindled the IOC's exasperation by unloading in mid-October its interim president, the American Ursula Garza Papandrea, responsible for cleaning up but replaced twice in four days. Suffice to say that in Tokyo, the anti-doping gendarmes will hardly let go of the weightlifters. "
Some sports are considered to be more at risk than others and, of course, the emphasis is on them (...) Weightlifting is one of them,
”Olivier Niggli, the managing director, recently confirmed to AFP. of WADA.