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LONDON — The first doping violation by a prominent athlete at the London Games was announced hours after the closing ceremony. Nadzeya Ostapchuk of Belarus was stripped of her gold medal in the shot-put Monday morning for testing positive for an anabolic steroid, the International Olympic Committee said.
Ostapchuk, 31, was tested Aug. 5 and again Aug. 6 after she competed in the shot-put, the I.O.C. said in a statement. Both urine samples were found to have methenolone, classified as an anabolic agent on the list of banned substances.
The gold medal was retroactively awarded to Valerie Adams of New Zealand, who had been the defending Olympic champion. Evgeniia Kolodko of Russia moves up to silver, and Lijiao Gong of China will receive a bronze medal.
The Belarus Olympic committee “is ordered to return to the I.O.C., as soon as possible, the medal, diploma and medalist pin awarded to the athlete in relation to the above-noted event,” the I.O.C. said in a statement.
Ostapchuk was competing in her third Olympics; she finished fourth in Athens in 2004 and got a bronze in Beijing in 2008. She won the shot-put competition last week with a throw of 21.36 meters, or 70.08 feet.
Only two other athletes who competed in the London Games have been publicly identified as having failed drug tests: Ghfran Almouhamad, a female hurdler from Syria who tested positive for a banned stimulant; and the American judo fighter Nick Delpopolo, who tested positive for marijuana. He said his positive test “was caused by my inadvertent consumption of food that I did not realize had been baked with marijuana, before I left for the Olympic Games.”
Several other athletes were sanctioned for doping right before the Games, including the gymnast Luiza Galiulina of Uzbekistan and the weight lifter Hysen Pulaku of Albania.
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