LONDON (AP) — The IOC’s anti-doping chief has acknowledged he could have acted sooner to retest samples from the 2004 Athens Olympics to catch any drug cheats who escaped detection at the time.
IOC medical commission chairman Arne Ljungqvist was criticized by senior IOC member Dick Pound on Wednesday for deciding only in May to retest about 100 samples from Athens. The International Olympic Committee is investigating up to five possible positive results from those retests.
Pound, former chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, says “if those we hope to deter understand we do nothing, there is not going to be much of a deterrent.”
Says Ljungqvist: “I admit we could have done it a little earlier.”
But he adds the IOC had no information that any banned substance used in Athens hadn’t already been tested for.
