No Canadians among 30 barred from Games
More than two dozen athletes fail doping tests in lead-up to Winter Olympics
Last Updated: Thursday, February 11, 2010 | 5:20 PM ET
CBC Sports
More than 30 athletes will miss the Vancouver Games for failing anti-doping tests, but not one of them is Canadian.
The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) says that no Canadians are among the athletes banned from competing in the Olympics for doping.
COC president Michael Chambers confirmed Canada's absence from the list on Thursday afternoon after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced that 30 athletes who had been expected to compete would be barred from the Games because they failed drug tests.
The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport also confirmed that no Canadian athletes violated anti-doping regulations.
The names of the banned athletes and the sports they compete in have not been released. The pre-Games testing wasn't conducted by WADA, and the details aren't the agency's to reveal, said WADA president John Fahey.
Some of the cases might still be in the process of being adjudicated, Fahey said.
The tests were conducted by national anti-doping agencies and international federations for Winter Game sports, and only those organizations know the details of which athletes failed the testing, said David Howman, director-general of WADA.
"It's a bit like before Beijing, when 70 athletes didn't go to the Games because they had tested positive beforehand," Howman told the New York Times. "The pre-Games testing is pretty intensive. We can say it was effective because there are some athletes who didn’t come."
Last week, it was announced Russia was holding back one of its cross-country skiing stars because she had tested positive for a blood doping product.
On Feb. 4, the International Olympic Committee took over responsibility for doping tests. It conducts tests throughout the Games at a laboratory in Vancouver staffed by three dozen scientists.
By Wednesday, it had conducted 554 doping tests, 407 on urine samples and 147 on blood samples. None of those was positive so far, said IOC spokesman Mark Adams.
