From Inside the Sport
Belarus’ Olympic hammer silver medallist Vadim Devyatovskiy has been cleared of serving a lifetime doping ban from all sports after a successful appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
Embarrassingly for International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) President Sebastian Coe, the decision was announced while he was visiting Minsk as the guest of European Athletics, organisers of a seminar there.
Coe was forced to sit close to Devyatovskiy at an event to officially open the seminar as the 39-year-old is now President of the Belarus Athletic Federation
Devyatovskiy has been involved in several doping scandals during his career.
Devyatovskiy served a two year ban from the sport between 2000 and 2002 for a failed drugs tests before returning to finish fifth at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, a performance upgraded to fourth when Hungarian champion Adrián Annus was disqualified for doping.
He then claimed silver medals at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki and at the 2006 European Championships in Gothenburg before winning the Olympic gold medal at Beijing in 2008.
An International Olympic Committee panel chaired by current President, and then vice-president, Thomas Bach, found Devyatovskiy guilty of taking anabolic steroids in December 2008 and stripped him of his gold medal.
This decision was reversed, however, following a successful appeal to CAS in 2010, and his medal was returned.
In 2012, Devyatovskiy’s team-mate Ivan Tsikhan was stripped of the Olympic silver medal he had won at Athens 2004 following a re-analysis of samples taken at the time.
it left Devyatovskiy in line to be promoted to bronze but no reallocation has ever taken place.
A fresh case was opened against Tsikhan and Devyatovskiy in 2013 when a frozen sample registered at the 2005 World Championships came back positive following retests.
Tsikhan was stripped of gold and Devyatovskiy of silver, with a lifetime ban likely due to a second separate failure.