More than 20 athletes who won Olympic medals in Beijing are among 45 athletes from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games whose anti-doping samples contained banned substances, a reanalysis has found. The International Olympic Committee says the findings nearly double the number of implicated athletes from those games.
That number of has now risen to 98. And while the IOC isn't identifying the 45 athletes or their countries who have what it calls an "Adverse Analytical Finding" at this point, here's what the organization is saying:
Proceedings against the athletes will begin after they're informed along with their sporting federations and national committees, the IOC says.
"All athletes found to have infringed the anti-doping rules will be banned from competing at the Olympic Games Rio 2016," the group adds, hinting that there could be more drama before the upcoming Summer Games begin in Rio two weeks from now.
The news comes one day after the international Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected an appeal from more than 60 track and field athletes from Russia who were seeking to compete despite their national sporting federation's recent suspension. Top Olympics officials have yet to make a decisive move in that case.
The IOC says the new doping results came from using "the very latest scientific analysis methods" to reanalyze stored samples from the Summer Games in Beijing and London — and that the work was guided by "an intelligence-gathering process that started in August 2015 and included the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and International Federations."
Here's a tally of the overall results from doping tests for the past two Summer Olympics, combining the first and second waves of testing:
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