International Weightlifting Federation has stopped Fijians lifters from participating in the Oceania Championships next week.

This comes after IWF conducted whereabouts monitoring on the final entries submitted in connection with the upcoming Oceania Championship.
Vashneel Prasad reports.

According to IWF, any athlete competing under their competitions, they need to let IWF & Oceania Regional Anti-Doping Organization know where they are going to be, at specific times, so they can perform no-advance-notice testing.

IWF sent out the new Anti-Doping Policy in April, the day the actual weightlifting competition at the Commonwealth Games started.

Weightlifting Fiji Secretary Ritesh Ratiram says upon return from the Commonwealth Games, they stepped up preparations for their Annual General Meeting which was held on the 29th of April.

Ratiram says, immediately after that, Weightlifting Fiji got caught in their internal matters.

He says they were still in the process of finalizing the extended squad between Levuka & Suva Weightlifting clubs’ athletes to the Oceania Championships during IWF’s whereabouts information deadline.

Previously, IWF had sent in follow up reminders to federations giving them a day’s notice to update the system. Unfortunately, no such follow-up reminders came for Oceania Championships.

Weightlifting Fiji had resolved to send a small team of four athletes to the Oceania Championships because the whereabouts information for these athletes was not entered in the monitoring system.

The IWF has reaffirmed to the sporting body that these Fiji athletes are ineligible to compete at the Oceania Championships.