Written by Rebecca R. Ruiz at NYTimes.com
Dozens of athletes expecting to compete at the coming Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro could be barred from the Games, the International Olympic Committee announced on Tuesday.
The I.O.C. retested 454 doping samples from the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, it said, discovering suspicious results among 31 athletes from 12 countries and six sports. The athletes were not publicly identified on Tuesday. The countries in question will be notified in coming days, according to a spokesman.
An additional 250 doping samples from the 2012 Summer Games in London are due to be retested, officials said, announcing broad scrutiny of athletes who have competed in recent Olympic Games.
The announcement came in the wake of a detailed account last week by the former longtime director of Russia’s antidoping lab, Grigory Rodchenkov, who said he worked for years at the direction of the Russian government to help the country’s top athletes use banned, performance-enhancing substances and go undetected.
Dr. Rodchenkov told The New York Times that Russian athletes had doped leading up to the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2012 London Games and throughout the course of the 2014 Sochi Games, when Russia controlled the Olympic testing laboratory. He described an overnight operation in which he and a small team had substituted Russian athletes’ tainted urine for clean urine, stockpiled in the months leading to competition and passed surreptitiously through a hole in the wall of the lab building.
Reacting to that account, the I.O.C. called a special meeting of its executive board, which convened by telephone on Tuesday. In a statement released after that call, the I.O.C. addressed Dr. Rodchenkov’s claims, repeating its calls for the World Anti-Doping Agency to initiate “a fully fledged investigation into allegations that testing at the Sochi Laboratory was subverted.”
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