Paris 2024 Sports Program: International Weightlifting Federation Completes Criteria
The International Weightlifting Federation has completed that last outstanding criteria required for the IOC’s March 2019 decision, lifting the conditional status of weightlifting’s place on the Paris 2024 sports programme, to be enforced.
The IOC’s March decision was based on a comprehensive series of measures established and implemented by the IWF in recent years, all aimed at protecting clean athletes and promoting clean sport. The final measure to be put in place was a contract with the International Testing Agency (ITA) that extends an agreement already put in place between the IWF and ITA in November 2018, with responsibility for a number of anti-doping areas being transferred to the ITA.
“Taken together, we are certain that the measures the IWF has put in place will contribute to sustained culture change for our sport. We are very happy that the latest steps the IWF has taken mean our athletes can train for an Olympic future with much greater certainty,” said IWF Director General Attila Adamfi.
Weightlifting is one of the handful of sports to have already featured on the sports programme of the first edition of the modern Olympic Games in 1896. The sport has recently known a popular resurgence among the general public, thanks to the increasing popularity of functional fitness and the proliferation of lifting platforms in gyms around the world.
“We are very much looking forward to having weightlifters join us in Paris in 2024,” said Paris 2024 Director General Etienne Thobois. “We had already been planning on having great competitions for weightlifting, and the certainty of their place on the programme now allows us to plan more effectively, in just the same way as it allows weightlifters to train with the proper focus.”
The improvements made by the IWF are the result of a wide-ranging team effort involving the World Anti-Doping Agency, national anti-doping agencies, independent experts, educators and the International Olympic Committee.
“We’ve been working particularly closely with the IWF, specifically on the issue of clean sport and we’ve seen the IWF implementing concrete measures to ensure a sustainable change in favour of clean weightlifting, not least thanks to a newly designed Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 qualification system, which links the number of quota available per country to their history of doping to explicitly reward clean sport” said IOC Sports Director Kit McConnell.
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