TORONTO –
Derek Drouin’s medal improve from the London Olympics is a optimistic signal for anti-doping measures in sport.
However the Olympic champion’s ideas after Friday’s information immediately went to the newly minted gold medallists, together with Erik Kynard of the U.S. in his occasion, whose possibilities to face atop the rostrum was stolen.
9 years after successful excessive bounce bronze on the 2012 London Olympics, Drouin’s medal was formally upgraded to silver on Friday because the IOC rubber-stamped disqualifications in a number of sports activities.
“It is nice to see these steps being taken to keep up the integrity of the Olympic Video games which present that there isn’t a place for doping in sport,” Drouin mentioned Friday.
“I’m simply pained for the athletes who had been denied the chance to take heed to their very own nationwide anthem whereas standing on high of the rostrum, in addition to the athletes who will now obtain their Olympic medal within the mail fairly than having the medal ceremony expertise they all the time dreamt of.”
Drouin, a 31-year-old from Corunna, Ont., went on to win gold on the 2015 world championships and 2016 Rio Olympics.
Ivan Ukhov initially received gold in London however was one in every of 12 Russian observe and discipline athletes who had been discovered responsible in February of 2019 of state-backed doping. He acquired a doping ban, and his outcomes from between July of 2012 to December of 2014 had been disqualified, together with his Olympic gold.
Males’s excessive bounce was one in every of 5 occasions in observe and discipline, canoeing and wrestling on the 2012 Olympics that noticed outcomes rewritten Friday as a part of the Worldwide Olympic Committee’s government board assembly. The IOC rubber-stamped the outcomes that needed to first be adjusted by the Worldwide Federations concerned.
Kynard was bumped as much as excessive bounce gold, whereas Drouin, Mutaz Essa of Qatar, and Britain’s Robert Grabarz — who’d initially completed in a three-way tie for third — now share silver.
Drouin mentioned a medal improve is “not the identical. Talking from expertise, (standing atop the rostrum) is one thing that I am going to always remember, and it is one thing that (Kynard) ought to have skilled, and he would possibly by no means now.”
Drouin, whose profession has been hampered by a number of critical accidents the previous few years, additionally received gold on the 2014 Commonwealth Video games and 2015 Pan American Video games.
A minimum of no one in Drouin’s occasion in London missed standing on the rostrum completely, he identified. Due to the three-way tie for bronze, there was no fourth-place finisher.
Canadian Dylan Armstrong completed fourth in shot put on the 2008 Beijing Olympics and so by no means climbed the Olympic medal podium. Years later, he was upgraded to bronze after Andrei Mikhnevich of Belarus was disqualified for doping. Armstrong lastly acquired his medal — Canada’s first in shot put at an Olympics — at a ceremony in his hometown of Kamloops, B.C., in 2015.
This report by The Canadian Press was first revealed Nov. 12, 2021.
