Doping Violations in Olympic Wrestling

The recent issue of the International Journal of Wrestling Science released just prior to the Senior World Championships in Belgrade contains an article entitled History of Doping Violations in Olympic Wrestling by David Curby (click here to access the article). It lists all doping violations through 2022. However, news broke at the end of these championships that a major violation had been retroactively identified with sanctions ordered through a reanalysis of a sample stored from 2015. Here is the press release from United World Wrestling:

Wednesday, September 20, 2023 – 10:48 By United World Wrestling Press

https://uww.org/article/cas-imposes-four-year-ban-gadisov

CORSIER-SUR-VEVEY, Switzerland (September 27) — The Court of Arbitration for Sport has imposed a four-year suspension on former world champion Abdusalam GADISOV for a sample collected on August 6, 2015.

Gadisov, who won the gold medal at the 2014 World Championship, was subjected to an out-of-competition test. The sample was initially reported negative by the Moscow lab but it was kept for long-term storage.

On a re-analysis by the Lausanne lab in April 2020, it returned with an adverse analytical finding for dehydrochloromethyltestosterone, an anabolic-androgenic steroid prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

The RUSADA ‘Disciplinary Anti-Doping Committee’ declared a decision on May 27, 2021 that the wrestler had not committed a doping violation. WADA and RUSADA appealed this decision to CAS.

The CAS heard the matter and decided that the wrestler had committed a doping violation and all the results of Gadisov from August 6, 2015 till August 5, 2019 must be disqualified including the silver medal he won at the 2015 World Championships in Las Vegas.

Abdusalam Gadisov has appealed against CAS’s decision to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.