Doping & Drugs ·
The Retest That Cost Anna Chicherova Her Beijing Bronze
An IOC ruling upheld on appeal erased her 2008 high-jump result. After two other athletes were disqualified, the IOC said the bronze would go to Chaunté Lowe, originally sixth.
Anna Chicherova’s bronze medal from Beijing lasted eight years before a retest of her stored urine sample changed the result. On October 4, 2016, the International Olympic Committee’s disciplinary commission found that the Russian high jumper had committed an anti-doping rule violation and disqualified her from the 2008 women’s high jump. It withdrew her medal and ordered her to return it, along with her diploma and medallist pin.
Chicherova had cleared 2.03 metres in the Beijing final to finish third. During the night after the competition, on August 24, she provided a urine sample. The laboratory in Beijing tested it and reported no adverse finding. The sample was later transferred to Lausanne for long-term storage, leaving it available for analysis after the Games.
The IOC began reanalysing stored samples from Beijing and London in 2015, using more advanced methods to look for prohibited substances that earlier tests had not detected. According to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the reanalysis of Chicherova’s Beijing sample produced a positive result for turinabol, a banned anabolic steroid. The disciplinary commission found violations involving both the presence and use of a prohibited substance.
Chicherova contested the proceedings. She argued that the IOC should have appealed the original negative laboratory result rather than brought a new disciplinary case. She also said she had not received all the documents she requested. The commission rejected both objections: the rules expressly allowed reanalysis, it said, and she had received the relevant analytical documentation. A negative laboratory report, the commission explained, recorded what the methods available at the time had found; it was not a binding decision that a sample was clean.
Chicherova appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport on October 25, 2016, seeking to overturn the decision. Her requests included an independent scientific review of the testing method’s validity and reliability, including the probability of false positives, as well as a challenge to the IOC’s authority to conduct the case. On October 6, 2017, the court dismissed her appeal and upheld the disqualification. The sanction concerned Beijing; her gold medal from the 2012 London Olympics was not affected.
The withdrawal did not, by itself, make the original fourth-place finisher the bronze medallist. Yelena Slesarenko, originally fourth, and Vita Palamar, originally fifth, were also disqualified in November 2016 after positive retests for turinabol.
That left American Chaunté Lowe, who had competed as Chaunté Howard in Beijing and originally finished sixth with a clearance of 1.99 metres. In November 2017, nine years after the final and a month after Chicherova’s appeal was rejected, the IOC announced that the bronze medal would be reassigned to Lowe.