Nigeria gets women 4x100m silver medal from Beijing Olympics

There were muted celebrations on Tuesday at the Riocentro Pavillion Six when the news broke that the International Olympics Committee (IOC) has awarded the women 4×100 relay silver medal at Beijing 2008 Olympics to Nigeria following the disqualification of initial gold medal winners, Russia, over a failed doping test.

Riocentro Pavillion Six was the venue of the ill-fated super heavyweight boxing bout between Nigeria’s Efe Ajagba and Ivan Dychko, which the Kazakhstani won.According to the IOC, Russia was stripped of the relay gold medal after one of its female runners tested positive for steroids in a reanalysis of her doping samples.

The culprit, Yulia Chermoshanskaya, tested positive for two drugs — stanozolol and turinabol — and was retroactively disqualified and, along with her teammates, stripped of the gold medal in the women’s 4×100-meter relay.

Chermoshanskaya was also disqualified from the 200 meters, in which she finished eighth.With the decision, Belgium, which originally finished in the second position, would move to the gold medal, while the bronze winners, Nigeria, would be upgraded to silver and Brazil to bronze.

The IOC asked the IAAF to modify the results and consider any further sanctions against Chermoshanskaya, who is no longer competing.According to AFP, the three other Russian runners in the relay final were Yulia Gushchina, Alexandra Fedoriva and Evgeniya Polyakova. Under IAAF rules, an entire relay team loses its medals if one of the runners tests positive.

The Nigerians in the relay team are Franca Idoko, Halimat Ismaila, Gloria Kemasuode, Oludayomi Osayomi and Agnes Osazuwa.The IOC revealed that Chermoshanskaya said in a written statement that she had been injured ahead of the Beijing Games and had been receiving injections on medical advice. But the body dismissed that excuse, saying she should have declared those medications at the time.

Turinabol and stanozolol are traditional steroids that go back decades. Canadian sprinter, Ben Johnson tested positive for stanozolol at Seoul ’88 Olympics, and he was stripped of the gold medal in the 100 meters.

Using enhanced techniques, the IOC has retested more than 1,000 doping samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Olympics to catch those who evaded detection at the time. A total of 98 athletes have been caught.

According to the AFP, the IOC stores doping samples for 10 years to allow them to be reanalyzed when improved tests become available, which means cheats can be caught years later. For the Beijing and London retests, the IOC used a method that can detect use of steroids going back weeks and months, rather than days.