New tests on old samples could catch drug cheats from Beijing Olympics

New tests allow use of performance-enhancing drugs to be detected for much longer than before, or in lower doses. The International Olympic Committee plans to use this new scientific knowledge to retest hundreds of doping samples from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, according to a report from the AP.

That could mean athletes being stripped of their medals seven years after they won them — or even ten years after the extension of the statute of limitations on doping tests in the most recent WADA code.

IOC medical director Richard Budgett said last week that some retests have already been carried out on stored samples from Beijing, the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and the 2012 London Olympics.

"Even if it's five or 10 years later, it's really an important thing to do," Budgett said. "It's not ideal. You want to do it as close as possible to the time, but if you've got no option but to do it later, then that's what you have to do."

Time's run out for the Athens 2004 samples the IOC has in its lab at Lausanne, but it can retest Beijing samples until 2018 and London samples until 2022.

In fact, the IOC intends to wait until the last moment to retest most samples. A small number of Beijing samples have been retested, though there have been no positive results so far, Budgett said. And a "significant number" will be retested in teh next few months from athletes who might take part in the 2016 Ro games.

But to take maximum advantage of the march of science, the rest will be tested later.

"Another significant number will be done before the samples expire in 2018," Budgett said. "It will be in the hundreds. Who knows what tests are going to be developed over the next two years? It makes a lot of sense to wait another couple of years for the majority."

Retests of samples from the 2004, and 2008 games has already turned up positives for blood booster CERA and steroids.

An improved test that's more sensitive to CERA's big brother, EPO, will be used on the 2008 samples, and a "long-term metabolite" method will be used that can detect steroids several months after their use.

"You can look back at something that you couldn't report as positive in the past and say, under the new rules, we can report that as positive," Budgett said.

While Budgett did not say whether any cycling athletes were being targeted, an improved EPO test opens the possibility of detecting users who had been micro-dosing with EPO in the belief that the existing test could only find evidence of very recent, large doses.