MOSCOW: The Beijing Olympics relay silver medallist Anastasiya Kapachinskaya and two other Russian athletes were banned for four years on Wednesday for doping.

Kapachinskaya, Inga Abitova and Denis Alekseyev, were caught out for using the prohibited substance turinabol when their samples from the 2008 Games were retested.

The bans were announced by the All-Russian Athletics Federation (RusAF).

Kapachinskaya, who also tested positive for stanozolol, was part of the women’s 4X400m relay team that came second in Beijing.

Her retested sample from the 2011 World Athletics Championships in Daegu also came back positive.

Abitova took sixth in the women’s 10,000m in China while Alekseyev picked up bronze in the men’s 4x400m relay bronze that year.

“These three runners have voluntary admitted doping code violations,” RusAF anti-doping coordinator Yelena Ikonnikova told AFP.

“Their avowals of guilt, which we received from the international athletics federation (IAAF) have been validated by the disciplinary committee of the country’s anti-doping agency RUSADA,” she added.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is retesting hundreds of stored samples from the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics using improved techniques to root out drug cheats.

Russia was accused in a World Anti-Doping Agency report last year of state-sponsored doping. Its athletics team was barred from last summer’s Rio Olympics and remains banned.

A number of Russian athletes have been granted permission by the IAAF to compete as neutrals after meeting the exceptional eligibility criteria.

Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2017