Rio de Janeiro’s
anti-doping lab was stripped of its accreditation by the World Anti-Doping
Agency (WADA) last year; Brazil is still without a certified drug testing
laboratory two years out from the next Olympics, which it will host. The
lab lost its accreditation because of the large number of
false positives and "repeated failures" test results that
the lab found. Apparently,
the lab had somewhat of a record for producing “false positives” – in 2012 it
produced a positive test for testosterone on Brazilian beach volleyball player
Pedro Solberg Salgado that was later shown to be false.
More recently, the
lab saw its positive test on
now-retired Chelsea soccer star Deco overturned when his sample was retested in
Lausanne. Deco originally tested positive for hydrochlorothiazide, a masking
agent for steroids, and tamoxifen, often used to lessen the side effects of
steroids, but he was officially cleared of the charges after the Lausanne
re-test.
Rio, Brazil is set to host
the Summer Olympics in 2016 and is now without a drug testing facility to test
the athletes with. For this year’s World Cup that was hosted in Brazil
there was no drug testing facility. All of the samples had to be shipped
to a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland according to Inside the Games. The cost
of shipping these samples were close to 250k.
According to CNN Money, the
cost of hosting the Olympics is rising and making a profit is harder.
There is even the cautionary tale of Greece who spent close to 11 Billion Euros
(double the amount the Government budgeted for) on the games and now the
country and most of the EU is in financial distraught. The cost of sending samples to Switzerland could be possibly double the cost the World Cup spent. Spending a possible 500K on shipping drug testing samples isn’t feasible for Rio. The
anti-doping lab in Rio needs to get its accreditation back by the time 2016
rolls around. Brazil is starring to rush but it is running out of time
for the 2016 Olympics.
This article is a summation of an article on Swimswam.com that can be found here.
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