Ukraine’s Olympic gymnast fails drug test

Oleg Verniaiev, who earned gold and silver medals at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics gymnastics competitions, said he has failed and drug test and will be out of the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. That could also rule him out of the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

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July 13, 2021 - 9:45 AM

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Olympic champion gymnast Oleg Verniaiev is set to miss the Tokyo Games because he has been banned following a failed drug test.

The Ukrainian gymnast said in an Instagram post on Tuesday that he tested positive for the banned substance meldonium and was banned after a ruling by the Gymnastics Ethics Foundation, which hears disciplinary cases in the sport.

Verniaiev said the GEF “decided that the concentration of meldonium found in my body is sufficient to ban me for four years” and that the ban is backdated to run from November 2020. That could also rule him out of the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

Verniaiev denies wrongdoing and said he will appeal the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

“The main question is how a banned substances got into my body?” he wrote. “Why did it happen at a time when there were no serious international competitions and there was only light training taking place?”

Verniaiev won gold on the parallel bars at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 and was the silver medalist in the all-around, in a dramatic, close loss to Japan’s Kohei Uchimura. Since then, his competitive appearances have been limited by injuries and now his ban, though he won all-around bronze at the last world championships in 2019.

The GEF and the International Gymnastics Federation have not commented on the case.

A positive test for meldonium led to tennis star Maria Sharapova serving a 15-month ban. Sharapova said she did not know it had been banned.

Meldonium is a heart medication developed in the then-Soviet Union, and was banned in sports from 2016.

It was also the substance which caused Russian curler Alexander Krushelnitsky to be stripped of a bronze medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Two Russian rowers were removed from their country’s Olympic squad last week after positive tests for meldonium.

ELSEWHERE, IOC President Thomas Bach referred to his Japanese hosts as Chinese when he appeared in public on Tuesday for the first time since arriving in Tokyo last week.

Giving a pep talk at the headquarters of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee, Bach’s opening remarks were, “You have managed to make Tokyo the best-ever prepared city for the Olympic Games. This is even more remarkable under the difficult circumstances we all have to face.”

Bach tripped over his words, referring to the “Chinese people” rather than “Japanese people.”

“Our common target is safe and secure games for everybody; for the athletes, for all the delegations, and most importantly also for the Chinese people — Japanese people,” Bach said, catching his mistake quickly.

The pandemic-postponed Olympics open in 10 days.

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