They were 260 in Rio, they will only be 120 weightlifters entered during the Olympic Games in Paris 2024. Far from the young and spectacular sports prized by the IOC, not very popular outside Eastern Europe and Central Asia , the discipline is already not really in the small papers of Thomas Bach, the President of the IOC, who warned last February about it: “The situation is becoming more and more serious.

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The situation is the infernal spiral of scandals that splash the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) since an investigation in January 2020 by the German channel ARD, bringing to light the "culture of corruption" within the federation for hide the massive use of doping.

Five months later, the Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren delivered a damning report, evoking the “cover-up” of 40 positive doping controls, for the IWF and its ex-boss, the Hungarian Tamas Ajan. The latter, together with the Romanian vice-president Nicolae Vlad and the president of the European Federation, the Turkish Hassan Akkus, is the subject of a disciplinary procedure of the International Control Agency (ITA). 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.

Weightlifting, a historic discipline that already existed during the ancient Games, has a long relationship with doping.

Since the controls were put in place, 110 positive cases have been detected at the Games, or more than a quarter of the Olympic total for all sports combined, resulting in the withdrawal of 49 medals.

In recent years, the IWF has had to suspend Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine.

It also deprived of the Tokyo Olympics Thailand, Egypt, Malaysia and most recently Romania.

Towards a historic eviction?

Suffice to say that the discipline will be scrutinized in Tokyo. "Some sports are considered to be more at risk than others and, of course, the emphasis is on them (...) Weightlifting is one of them", recently confirmed to AFP Olivier Niggli, the general manager of WADA. And it would be better to avoid a new redesigned podium, otherwise the IOC will have to "look into its place in the program of the Olympics-2024 in Paris and future Olympics", threatens Thomas Bach.

Such an ouster would be historic, the IOC not having sanctioned a sport in this way since tennis from 1928 to 1964, 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 has withdrawn from the International Federation the organization of its own Olympic tournament, but maintains the discipline in Tokyo.

To leave the program, for a discipline present at the Games since their refoundation in Athens in 1896, would be a real snub.

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  • Sport

  • CIO

  • Weightlifting

  • Olympic Games

  • Tokyo Olympics 2021

  • Doping

  • Corruption