Hungarian Olympic discus champion Robert Fazekas will lose his gold medal and be expelled from the Games after breaking doping rules, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said yesterday. The IOC said in a statement that Fazekas had refused to provide a complete urine sample after Monday’s final, which qualified as a serious anti-doping violation. He has been ordered to return his gold, the IOC said.
Lithuanian Virgilijus Alekna will now be awarded the gold, Zoltan Kovago of Hungary the silver and Aleksander Tammert of Estonia the bronze. The IOC’s Executive Board’s said that Fazekas had provided 25ml of urine when the required minimum quantity was 75ml.
Fazekas’s representatives, Hungarian team officials Zsigmond Nagy and Karoly Piko, told the IOC the athlete was “a deeply religious person who has always had difficulty to produce a sufficient quantity of urine in front of sample collectors. The athlete had a serious psychological block and asked to leave the doping station straight away”.
The IOC said Fazekas was informed that his refusal would constitute a doping offense.
The IOC also said that the head of the Doping Control Station Dr Tsarouchas Panagiotis and IAAF representative Dr. Gabriel Dolle stated that “there are suspicions and allegations concerning certain technical methods and devices which would be used by certain athletes in order to avoid delivery of their own urine.
“While such suspicions and allegations are not proven, the attitude of the athlete raises a number of questions which were not answered.
“The fact remains that the athlete deliberately refused to submit to the full doping control procedure, thus committing an anti-doping rule violation.”
Fazekas is the second athletics gold medalist to forfeit his title at the Athens Games after a positive test. Irina Korzhanenko of Russia was stripped of her women’s Olympic shot put gold on Sunday after testing positive for a steroid.
The IOC also confirmed earlier reports that Belarussian high jumper Aleksey Lesnichiy, who was last in the qualifying round, had tested positive for the anabolic agent clenbuterol.
The 26-year-old was also excluded from the Games. So far 2,015 of the expected 3000 drug tests have been completed.
