Who needs steroids when you can lift considerably more as a 'clean' athlete!
Last night convicted doper Kazakh weightlifter Nijat Rahimov, took the Gold medal in the 77kg weight class, barely a year after returning from a 2 year doping ban. He needed to break the 15 year old Clean & Jerk WR by a huge margin in order to beat the defending champion from London 2012 who was the red hot favourite to win Gold again - the fact that he managed to do this and beat everyone else in the field by more than 12kg/5% is nothing short of farcical!
Rahimov and the rest of Kazakhstan weightlifting team were extremely lucky not to have been excluded from the Rio Olympics entirely after widespread failures in recent retests of doping samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics. The country stands to lose all their five gold medals from those games.
Controversially, Kazakhstan was only allowed to compete because those doping cases were not fully processed in time for the games, according to the International Weightlifting Federation.
Bronze medalist Mohamed Mahmoud of Egypt, said he found Rahimov's dramatic improvement since his ban extremely suspicious. "Maybe after some doping controls, some things will change," Mahmoud said. While improvements like Rahimov's can be the result of good training and nutrition, Mahmoud said, "in a very short time it cannot happen like that."
That Rahimov came back to break the 15 year old world record and lift considerably more than he did when previously busted for steroids makes a complete mockery of the sport - which considering the farcical number of retest failures of medal winners from the last two olympics(Including every Kazakhstan weightlifting Gold medallist) - surely proves beyond doubt, like the Russians, Azerbaijanis, Bulgarians and Belarussians, the Kazakh weightlifters should have been banned completely from the Rio Olympics.
For Rahimov, immediately after winning Gold in Rio, to post videos on social media of training lifts supposedly achieved 'clean', that were hugely above his 'new' WR of last night and anything he has done previously in competition even when caught taking steroids, is either stupidity of the highest order or totally disingenuous, as it insults the intelligence of everyone involved in the sport and brings the IOC into disrepute.
Rahimov was banned for two years in 2013 after failing a test while competing for Azerbaijan, another country with longstanding huge doping problems. Rahimov was one of 18 Azerbaijanis busted that year. Rahimov was born in Azerbaijan and recently moved to Kazakhstan to compete on its weightlifting team.
From the very top in Kazakhstan, laughably, the political message to the athletes is to keep calm and focus on the Games. “Your job is to win, to fight,” President Nazarbayev told Kazakhstan’s Olympians at a July 4 meeting, urging the athletes not to be concerned with “the situation with all these anti-doping measures that are simply incomprehensible to many.” So there you have it - Nazarbayev seems to suggest anti doping controls are just too complicated for his athletes to understand, and therefore something they should not concern themselves with ie "we'll deal with the fallout should the 'unexpected' occur and any of his athletes/cyclists return a positive test!
Nazarbayev rewards every Kazakh Olympian who breaks a WR or wins a Gold Medal $250,000.
Last night convicted doper Kazakh weightlifter Nijat Rahimov, took the Gold medal in the 77kg weight class, barely a year after returning from a 2 year doping ban. He needed to break the 15 year old Clean & Jerk WR by a huge margin in order to beat the defending champion from London 2012 who was the red hot favourite to win Gold again - the fact that he managed to do this and beat everyone else in the field by more than 12kg/5% is nothing short of farcical!
Rahimov and the rest of Kazakhstan weightlifting team were extremely lucky not to have been excluded from the Rio Olympics entirely after widespread failures in recent retests of doping samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics. The country stands to lose all their five gold medals from those games.
Controversially, Kazakhstan was only allowed to compete because those doping cases were not fully processed in time for the games, according to the International Weightlifting Federation.
Bronze medalist Mohamed Mahmoud of Egypt, said he found Rahimov's dramatic improvement since his ban extremely suspicious. "Maybe after some doping controls, some things will change," Mahmoud said. While improvements like Rahimov's can be the result of good training and nutrition, Mahmoud said, "in a very short time it cannot happen like that."
That Rahimov came back to break the 15 year old world record and lift considerably more than he did when previously busted for steroids makes a complete mockery of the sport - which considering the farcical number of retest failures of medal winners from the last two olympics(Including every Kazakhstan weightlifting Gold medallist) - surely proves beyond doubt, like the Russians, Azerbaijanis, Bulgarians and Belarussians, the Kazakh weightlifters should have been banned completely from the Rio Olympics.
For Rahimov, immediately after winning Gold in Rio, to post videos on social media of training lifts supposedly achieved 'clean', that were hugely above his 'new' WR of last night and anything he has done previously in competition even when caught taking steroids, is either stupidity of the highest order or totally disingenuous, as it insults the intelligence of everyone involved in the sport and brings the IOC into disrepute.
Rahimov was banned for two years in 2013 after failing a test while competing for Azerbaijan, another country with longstanding huge doping problems. Rahimov was one of 18 Azerbaijanis busted that year. Rahimov was born in Azerbaijan and recently moved to Kazakhstan to compete on its weightlifting team.
From the very top in Kazakhstan, laughably, the political message to the athletes is to keep calm and focus on the Games. “Your job is to win, to fight,” President Nazarbayev told Kazakhstan’s Olympians at a July 4 meeting, urging the athletes not to be concerned with “the situation with all these anti-doping measures that are simply incomprehensible to many.” So there you have it - Nazarbayev seems to suggest anti doping controls are just too complicated for his athletes to understand, and therefore something they should not concern themselves with ie "we'll deal with the fallout should the 'unexpected' occur and any of his athletes/cyclists return a positive test!
Nazarbayev rewards every Kazakh Olympian who breaks a WR or wins a Gold Medal $250,000.
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