Five weightlifters, including two Olympic champions, have been provisionally suspended after reanalysis of urine samples provided during the 2012 London Olympics, the International Weightlifting Federation announced on Monday.
Ukrainian Oleksiy Torokhtiy, Olympic -105kg gold medallist six years ago, and Uzbek Ruslan Nurudinov, who won the same category in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, both tested positive for anabolic steroids.
Only Torokhtiy stands to lose his title, as the samples retested were given four years before Nurudinov’s gold-medal winning performance in Brazil.
Valentin Hristov of Azerbaijan, currently serving an eight-year ban following two positive doping tests in 2013 and 2015, could lose his 2012 bronze medal from the -56kg category after also testing positive for an anabolic agent.
The other two athletes to test positive — Armenia’s Meline Daluzyan and Belarusian Mikalai Novikau — did not win medals in London.
Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that new analysis of samples from the 2012 Games using “the most recent scientific methods” would be entrusted to the newly-formed International Testing Agency.