Female Olympian Athletes Suspended For Doping
Posted on July 31, 2008
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The Russian track team suffered a huge embarrassment and a potentially severe blow to its Olympic medal hopes Thursday when seven female athletes were suspended for doping violations with the Beijing Games set to open in eight days.
The seven women included Yelena Soboleva, the world’s top performer this year at 800 and 1,500 meters, and Tatyana Tomashova, who won a silver medal in the 1,500 at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The Russian women were suspended by track and field’s world governing body and were accused of fraudulently using substitute urine in an attempt to pass doping tests.
Five of the athletes were on the Russian team’s roster for the Beijing Olympics: Soboleva; Tomashova; Gulfiya Khanafeyeva (hammer throw); Darya Pishchalnikova (discus); and Yulia Fomenko (1,500-meters).
The governing body, known by its initials as the I.A.A.F., said it had been investigating the Russian women for more than a year. The athletes were caught when urine samples they had previously given, which had been stored, were compared with other samples, presumably provided at recent meets. [via NYT]
