Bans kick in for drug cheats after 2008 Olympics

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By Gennady Fyodorov

SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - IOC President Jacques Rogge said on Thursday that athletes who committed a serious doping offence would miss the following Olympics but the penalty would kick in only after the 2008 Games.

Rogge added that in exceptional cases competitors could be thrown out of the Olympic movement for life.

"The IOC executive board has decided that any athlete who has been sanctioned for more than six months would not be allowed to participate in the next Games," Rogge told Reuters in an interview during his first visit to the host city of the 2014 Winter Games.

The IOC chief said such sanctions would be applied after the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

"It would be unfair to do it before the Beijing Games because athletes have already started their qualification competitions," he said.

"But we will start applying the sanctions immediately after the Games in Beijing, so whoever gets more than a six-month penalty would be banned from the London Games in 2012."

Rogge said: "You have to keep in mind that an athlete who gets more than six months is someone who has taken an EPO or anabolic steroids which are the most powerful doping agents and also the most dangerous.

"It means those people have committed very serious infringements. We're not going to (ban) an athlete who has just taken some ephedrine and gets three months," he added.

However, Rogge said that in some exceptional circumstances when the infringements were very severe, there could be a permanent ban.

He gave as an example six Austrian biathletes and cross-country skiers who were accused of blood doping at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin and subsequently were thrown out of the Olympics.

"Also, all second time offenders get a permanent ban. That rule will stay," Rogge said.

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