The 2012 Olympic men’s weightlifting 94kg event, arguably already the dirtiest in history with six of the top seven finishers stripped for steroid use, added another name to its doping list.
Albanian Endri Karina, who originally finished 14th but had moved up to seventh via other athletes’ doping DQs, failed a retest of his doping sample from those Games.
Karina’s sample tested positive for steroids, and he has been provisionally suspended, according to the International Weightlifting Federation.
It is up to the IOC to determine if Karina will be retroactively disqualified from the 2012 London Olympics. Given precedent, that’s likely to happen.
The IOC already retroactively stripped seven lifters from that event for failing retests of doping samples, all for anabolic steroids:
Gold: Ilya Ilyin (Kazakhstan)
Silver: Aleksandr Ivanov (Russia)
Bronze: Anatoli Cîrîcu (Moldova)
4. Andrey Demanov (Russia)
6. Intigam Zairov (Azerbaijan)
7. Almas Uteshov (Kazakhstan)
11. Norik Vardanian (Armenia)
The fifth-place finisher, Saeid Mohammadpour of Iran, was upgraded to gold. The eighth-place finisher, Kim Min-jae of South Korea, to silver. The ninth-place finisher, Tomasz Zielinski of Poland, to bronze.
Zielinski was thrown out of the Rio Olympics after testing positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone.
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