Armenian lifter 'strongest favorite' to win European Championships gold

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Olympic super-heavyweight silver medallist Simon Martirosyan is one of nearly 150 weightlifters who will compete at the European Junior and Under-23 Championships over the next week, before sitting out a year of exile from international competition, Inside the Games says.

Martirosyan, the strongest favourite to win gold in any of the categories here in the host city of Durres, Albania, is from Armenia, one of the seven European nations who are about to begin a one-year ban from the sport.

A total of nine nations have been banned by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) for having three or more positives in the retesting of doping samples from the Beijing 2008 and London 2012 Olympic Games.

Kazakhstan and China are the only non-Europeans.

Antonio Urso, the Italian President of the European Weightlifting Federation (EWF), said: "This is a really sad moment for me and for European weightlifting but it is a necessary situation.

"We must stop and think about the future of our sport."

The EWF Executive Board met today to discuss "how to push in a cultural way to cancel this problem".

"History shows us that changing a culture is a slow process," Urso added.