Pyrros Dimas of Greece will chair the Athletes' Commission OF the IWF

Weightlifting to appoint Independent Testing Authority in bid to combat doping and save place in Olympics

By Brian Oliver  Sunday, 1 October 2017

Weightlifting will hand over its anti-doping programme to an Independent Testing Authority ©Getty Images

Weightlifting will hand over its anti-doping programme to an Independent Testing Authority (ITA) as a keystone of its plans to clean up the sport and retain its place on the Olympic Games schedule.

There was also a presentation by the IWF Sport Programme Commission, whose primary focus is to decide on the bodyweight categories for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, where weightlifting will have seven men's and seven women's medal events, one fewer than Rio 2016.

This Commission, said the IWF in a statement, "will also look beyond 2020 and identify innovative ways to refresh the event programme to make it more attractive to global audiences".

More details will be released during the next two months, and the Executive Board will meet again in late November before the IWF World Championships in Anaheim, California.

Those Championships will go ahead without nine top nations, who were banned for a year at the Bucharest meeting yesterday for having three or more positives in the IOC retests.

Another decision of the Board was to award the 2018 Junior World Championships to Uzbekistan.

North Korea had provisionally been awarded the hosting rights but political difficulties have made that impossible.

In other business in Bucharest the Board appointed chairs for a number of its Commissions.

Pyrros Dimas of Greece will chair the Athletes' Commission with Tom Goegebuer of Belgium serving as deputy.

The Women's Commission will be chaired by American Ursula Papandrea while Birendra Prasad of India will head the Disciplinary and Ethics Commission.

The Czech Republic's Petr Krol will chair the Membership Commission while the Development and Education Commission and Marketing Commission will be led by Peru's Jose Quinones and Zhanat Tussupbekov of Kazakhstan respectively.

Aján will chair the Intercontinental Committee with Egypt's Mamal Mahmoud Mahgoub in charge of the Coaching and Research Committee.

Karoliina Lundahl of Finland will serve under Mahgoub as deputy.