Kiev (UKR) – The Ukrainian racewalking is facing a possible scandal due to the precautionary suspension for doping of two of its top athletes, Nazar Kovalenko and Igor Glavan.
For Kovalenko, suspended as early as March 27, 2017 and waiting for a decision of his national antidoping court, everything would depend on anomalies in his biological passport; the confirmation of the suspension came after the publication on the website of the Athletics Integrity Unit of the list of disciplinary proceedings in progress.
The name of Glavan instead seemed not to be on any list, but already from the recent World racewalking championships in Taicang, his absence in the posthumous award ceremony of the Rome 2016 50Km race (he should have withdrawn the bronze medal after the disqualification for doping of Alex Schwarzer) had aroused perplexity. The confirmation however had been published for some time on the Ukrainian anti-doping website; because of the Cyrillic characters the news has not been leaked in the European media, but it is officially confirmed that the athlete is suspended from 22 December 2017, and is also awaiting a decision of his national antidoping court.
These two alleged doping cases are added to that of aprile 2018, about the other ukrainian walker Ruslan Dmytrenko; even for him the anomalies of the biological passport have to be clarified.
To guarantee the above mentioned athletes it is necessary to underline how at present these suspensions do not yet correspond to a conviction, as had already happened in the case of Matej Tóth’s biological passport, which was suspended temporarily in 2017 (and then turned out to be innocent).
Recall that the ukrainian racewalking has unfortunately already been recently hit by doping, with the ban of 4 years for both the young Dmytro Harnyk (positive to the steroid Oxandrolone) and for Lyudmila Olyanovska (positive to the steroid Dehydrochloromethyltestosterone), and 3 years ban for Olena Shumkina (abnormal biological passport).