All doping tests at worlds negative

Sep 21, 2007, 16:08 GMT

Monte-Carlo - Athletic's controlling body IAAF on Friday announced that all doping tests conducted at last month's world championships returned negative results.

IAAF president Lamine Diack said that the testing programme in Osaka was the largest ever conducted by the IAAF with even more tests collected than the organization had originally planned.

'We now have an important year ahead of us as we look forward to Beijing and must continue to work hard to prevent doping in our sport,' he said.

The IAAF said that in total, 1,132 samples were collected both pre-competition and in-competition on a total of 976 individual athletes, which is more than the 1,000 samples planned.

In addition to the figures above, 82 athletes were tested during their team training camps in Japan as part of the ongoing IAAF out- of-competition testing programme and just one of these returned a positive result.

French athlete Naman Keita tested positive tested positive for testosterone and is now facing a two-year ban.

The IAAF said in a statement that testing conducted from the opening of the athlete's village on 20 August (pre-competition) focused on gathering hematological blood profiles and screening blood samples for the indication of possible EPO abuse.

'The total number of tests conducted pre-competition was 534 which included 429 blood screens for profiling purposes.

'During the championships themselves a total of 598 tests were conducted. Of these tests, 179 were urine tests for the detection of EPO, a further 103 were blood samples taken for the detection of blood transfusions, while the remaining 316 were standard urine tests,' the statement said.