Double world champion Francisco Mosquera, who competed in this year’s International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) World Championships in September, has been provisionally suspended after testing positive for the steroid boldenone.
No details of the offence – such as time, place, testing authority, or whether the sample was taken in-competition or out-of-competition – are listed alongside the announcement published on Thursday by the International Testing Agency (ITA), which carries out all anti-doping procedures for the IWF.
Mosquera is a multiple champion and medallist who won world titles at 62 kilograms in 2017 and at 67kg at home in Bogota in 2022.
He finished fourth at 67kg in this year’s World Championships in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, five weeks ago, where he would have won clean and jerk gold and bronze on total if he had made either of his last two attempts.
Because there is no 67kg category at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Mosquera, 31, is well down the rankings in the next highest weight class, 73kg, in which his team-mate and unrelated namesake Luis Javier Mosquera is a stronger contender.
Francisco Mosquera becomes the eighth Colombian weightlifter since 2013 to have been suspended for the same offence, testing positive for boldenone or boldenone metabolites.
Boldenone, a steroid, is widely used in the cattle-rearing industry in Colombia and other parts of Latin America.
Colombia has not had any weightlifters suspended for any other specified doping offence this century, according to the list of recent and historic sanctions published by the IWF and ITA.
When samples provided by three Colombians came up positive in January 2020, Colombia faced exclusion from the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
Although the Games were delayed by a year those cases went to appeal and were not concluded before the competition began in Tokyo.
The ITA and the Colombian Federation came to an agreement whereby five of Colombia’s eight quota places were forfeited.
All three athletes, Ana Segura, Yenny Sinisterra and Juan Felipe Arboleda, claimed that they had unknowingly ingested boldenone in tainted beef but they were subsequently banned for four years when the Court of Arbitration for Sport turned down their appeals.
Two more Russians have been suspended for four years for historic offences that came to light in analysis of data from the Moscow Laboratory, the ITA has announced.
One, Armen Alekyan, does not appear on the IWF results database and the other, Dmitriy Chalyy, competed at the 2011 Universiade and never again.
Source: Inside The Games
