Former European triple jump champion Fabrizio Donato is among several top Italian athletes who could miss out on Rio Games

Agencies/Rome


Some of the biggest names in Italian athletics risk missing out on next year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics following a request from anti-doping authorities to impose a two-year ban on 26 athletes.
The Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) said they are accused of evading official tests, while the charge of failing to report on their whereabouts—an obligation for all professional athletes—was dropped.
World champion pole-vaulter Giuseppe Gibilisco, former world silver medallist long-jumper Andrew Howe, former European triple jump champion Fabrizio Donato and former world-class sprinter Simone Collio are among the athletes at risk of sanctions.
A sports tribunal has yet to make a decision on the 2-year ban request.
CONI President Giovanni Malago, however, downplayed the accusations yesterday, which he said covered the 2009-2012 period.
“These people are not cheats,” he told RTL 102.5 radio, arguing that technical problems with now-abandoned reporting procedures were to blame for miscommunication problems. “There is ample room for justification,” he added.
Malago said athletes used to have to send faxes to signal their whereabouts to their sports federation, which would forward them to anti-doping authorities. “It was a very inefficient system,” he said, adding that the process is now done by mobile phone applications.
The doping investigations were triggered by the case of Alex Schwazer, a race walker who won Olympic gold in 2008 but was caught doping just head of the London 2012 Games and banned three-and-a-half years.
A total of 65 athletes were probed, but anti-doping prosecutors cleared 39 of them, sustaining the accusations only against the group of 26.
One of them, hammer-thrower Silvia Salis, professed her innocence in remarks carried by the ANSA news agency: “People who know me know that in my 15 years of career I have always fought against doping.”
The President of the Italian Athletics Federation FIDAL, Alfio Gionni, expressed “confidence” in the work of anti-doping authorities and called for a “speedy resolution of the judicial case.”
Former high-jumper Sara Simeoni, an Olympic champion in 1980, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper that the scandal had made her stomach “churn.”
She stressed that doping “is not just an Italian problem,” and called for tougher punishment against drug cheats. “If you break the rules you should be out, life bans would send out a strong signal,” she said.
The athletes repeatedly failed to respond to emails from the authorities in 2011-2012 requesting information on their whereabouts so they could be subjected to random doping tests.
Malago said the problem had been due to inefficient procedures which had since been tightened up.
He said the requests for information had not been sufficiently formal, with “no type of warning,” whereas “now there is a warning and then a yellow card and then a red card.”
Giomi, Malago and some of the athletes cited communications failings due to faulty fax machines, problems with email passwords and digital apps that did not work properly.
“There has been negligence and superficiality on the part of many athletes, absolutely, but that has nothing to do with doping,” said Giomi.
Some athletes were threatening to give up, he said, but Italian athletics “is alive and it’s honest.”
Giomi complained that Italian newspapers, which gave front-page treatment to the scandal yesterday, would dedicate “a tenth of the space when they are acquitted in two months’ time.”
Fabrizio Donato, who won the bronze medal in the triple jump at the 2012 London Olympics, said he was disappointed by the NADO prosecutors who had shown no flexibility in the face of the athletes’ explanations.
“I have been going to all the doping checks for 10 years,” he said at the same news conference as Giomi. “We want a bit of respect,” he added.
The scandal is the latest to his athletics, which was plunged into crisis last month when a report by the independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) detailed systematic, state-sponsored doping and related corruption in Russia.
The IAAF, governing body of world athletics, has since voted overwhelmingly to suspend Russia from the sport—potentially casting one of track and field’s most successful nations out of next year’s Rio Olympics.