Asli Cakir Alptekin surrenders London Olympic 1500m gold and will serve an eight-year ban after admitting blood doping

Turkey’s Asli Cakir Alptekin will hand back her London Olympic gold medal
The 1500m runner admitted blood doping and will serve an eight-year ban
Alptekin has forfeited all of her results from July 29, 2010

Martha Kelner for MailOnline

Published:
17:58 GMT, 17 August 2015

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Updated:
17:58 GMT, 17 August 2015

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Olympic champion Asli Cakir Alptekin has agreed to hand back the 1500m gold medal she won at London 2012 and will serve an eight-year ban after admitting blood doping.

The IAAF have been fighting accusations for weeks that they are not doing enough to stop athletes cheating even though dozens of blood passports are showing suspicious results.

Officials and athletes are gathering in Beijing for the world championships so the timing could not be better as far as the IAAF are concerned.

Asli Cakir Alptekin (left) poses with the gold medal which she won in the London 2012 Olympic Games

Alptekin (centre) has forfeited results from July 29, 2010 and will serve an eight-year ban for blood doping

Alptekin, from Turkey, has admitted to blood doping and will also lose her 2012 European Championship title

The Court of Arbitration for Sport stepped in at the request of the governing body after the Turkish Athletics Federation cleared Alptekin in December 2013.

She has forfeited all her results from July 29, 2010, including the Olympic gold and her 2012 European Championship title. She won in London after lowering her personal best time by almost nine seconds throughout the season.

CAS said the IAAF charge that Alptekin manipulated her blood ‘is upheld by default’ because of the runner’s consent.

The agreement published by CAS notes that ‘she is unable to substantiate the explanations she has offered for those values, and therefore is unable to rebut the IAAF’s assertion that those values are the result of some form of blood manipulation.’

Alpetkin, who previously served a two-year ban for testing positive for an anabolic steroid at the 2004 world junior championships, receives the maximum ban for a second doping offence.

She had argued that her blood readings were caused by living and training at altitude as well as for medical issues but experts dismissed her claims.

Gamze Bulut (right) could inherit the gold after finishing second to Alptekin in London 2012

The Alptekin news has clouded the battle between Sebastian Coe and Sergey Bubka for IAAF president

The Olympic gold could go to another Turk, Gamze Bulut, who finished second. That would make fourth-placed Russian Tatyana Tomashova in line for bronze – she served a two-year ban in 2008 after swapping urine to avoid detection.

Athletics has been rocked in recent weeks with claims of wide-scale cheating while the IAAF has been picked out for not doing enough despite being in possession of dodgy blood passports.

The issue has clouded the battle between Sebastian Coe and Sergey Bubka to take over from Lamine Diack as president.