LAUSANNE: Tamas Ajan, the former head of the International Weightlifting Federation, and IWF’s former vice-president Nicu Vlad have been banned from the sport for life for covering up doping offences, the International Testing Agency (ITA) said on Thursday.

Hungarian Ajan, who has denied wrongdoing, and Romanian Vlad were charged with “complicity and tampering” in regard to doping offences by the ITA in June last year.

The duo were given lifetime bans by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) for “covering up, delaying and obstructing results management for certain athletes that committed anti-doping rule violations (ADRVs),” the ITA said in a statement.

The ITA, an independent organisation which implements anti-doping programmes for international federations, took over the IWF doping programme in the lead-up to the Tokyo Olympics.

Allegations of misconduct against top IWF officials were first uncovered by German broadcaster ARD in 2020 and substantiated after an investigation by Professor Richard McLaren the following year.

Ajan and Vlad challenged the charges against them in the CAS, which sided with the ITA and issued lifetime bans to the duo.

Published in Dawn,June 17th, 2022