Lausanne (AFP)
The International Control Agency (ITA), whose programs have been slowed down since the start of the coronavirus crisis, is preparing to "increase" its capacities during the summer in order to "adapt" to the postponement of a year of the Tokyo Olympics, she announced Friday.
The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in "the cancellation and postponement of many international competitions", including the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and made "doping control activities worldwide impossible as planned", explained the ITA in a press release the day after a meeting of its council, chaired by the former French Minister of Sports, Valérie Fourneyron.
The ITA is prepared "to increase its capacities during the summer in order to intelligently conduct the planned or reprogrammed tests" while the anti-doping program of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics "is currently adapted" to be carried out until 2021.
The ITA was mandated by the International Olympic Committee to conduct the doping control program before and during the Tokyo Olympics.
The Lausanne-based agency, which began operations in July 2018, also announced Friday that it has completed its mission to re-analyze samples taken during the London 2012 Olympics which revealed "more than 80 anti-doping rule violations and led to reallocations of medals. "
Regarding the Rio 2016 Olympics, the strategy is "to wait as long as possible until detection methods that are not available at the time of sampling become so," ITA told AFP. The deadline for the reanalysis of the samples for the Rio Olympics is 10 years and therefore runs until August 2026, the agency said.
A reanalysis program has so far been carried out concerning the Olympic Games in Beijing-2008, Vancouver-2010 and London-2012.
The ITA also indicated that it "finalizes" the construction in Switzerland, in a place "which will not be revealed", of a site of centralized storage of samples taken by the national anti-doping agencies. These samples will be kept for up to 10 years.
At the beginning of April, an ITA spokesperson estimated that the fight against doping was "very impacted" by the coronavirus crisis, because the restrictions imposed by the various states "complicated the logistics of out-of-competition testing. ".
© 2020 AFP