30 Athletes Banned from Vancouver Olympics for Failing Drug Tests

Thirty athletes have been banned from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics for drug use. Those 30 athletes failed drug tests leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics and are going to be barred from competing this year, according to the ESPN news wire. This is of course bad news for the upcoming Olympic Games, but it was probably expected as something like this has been announced at the previous Olympic Games as well. In the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, it was 70 athletes that were banned from the competition when they failed drug tests, but there are also many more athletes that compete in the Summer Games.

The news of the 30 barred athletes comes from the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (David Howman) who told the New York Times that this was taking place. It's sad that so many of these athletes failed their drug tests, but even worse that so many of them felt that there was a need to cheat in order to compete at this high level of their respective sports. The good news for the United States Olympic Team is that they didn't have anyone on the list of the banned athletes, so it means that they won't be missing any of their contingent due to drug suspensions when the Olympics kick off on Friday night. It sounds like many other countries were not quite as lucky.

Testing has been improved a lot in recent years to try and catch cheaters before they can actually make it into the Olympics. There has been far too many medals stripped from competitors who won them and then had it later discovered that they cheated in order to attain them. The ban of steroids is a good thing for sports, and it is really good to see that the Olympic Games are trying hard to keep their events clean again this year. Specific athlete names were not revealed at this time, but it may be easy to figure it out when the update lists of competitors are released and they are compared to the list of athletes that were supposed to attend.

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Games begin on Friday, February 12th, 2010.

Source:associatedcontent.com/