Moroccan medal favourite tests positive

Olympics: Morocco’s Mariem Alaoui Selsouli, the favourite for the women’s 1500m gold medal at London 2012, has been provisonally…

Olympics:Morocco's Mariem Alaoui Selsouli, the favourite for the women's 1500m gold medal at London 2012, has been provisonally suspended from all competition in athletics after testing positive for the banned diuretic furosemide.

Selsouli’s sample was collected at a Diamond League meeting in Paris on July 6th and she has waived her right to the B analysis.

Selsouli has the right to request a hearing which would need to be held by the Moroccan Athletic Federation within the next three months.

Her suspension was confirmed in an official IAAF statement today.

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The 28-year-old served a two-year ban from 2009-11 for a doping offence. She ran a world-leading three minutes 56.15 seconds at the Diamond League meeting in Paris, the fastest time in the world since 2006, and won silver at the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul in March.

British marathon runner Paula Radcliffe was forthright in her opinion of Selsouli when the first reports of her positive test emerged earlier this week.

She Tweeted: “World 1500m leader(strike that off) Alaoui Selsouli(MAR) will miss Olympics as she’s tested positive at Paris DL. Good riddance,no surprise.”

The IAAF also confirmed nine further athletes have been sanctioned for doping offences.

Six - Morocco’s Abderrahim Goumri, Irini Kokkinariou from Greece, Turkey’s Meryem Erdogan, Russian Svetlana Klyuka and compatriots Nailiya Yulamanova and Yevgenina Zinurova received bans of between two and four years under the biological passport programme.

The biological passport involves measuring and monitoring an athlete’s blood variables over time to establish whether an athlete has been doping.

Bulgarian Inna Eftimova and Ukrainian pair Nataliya Tobias and Antonina Yefremova returned positive tests for synthetic Growth Hormone and synthetic testosterone respectively following re-analysis of their blood and urine samples collected at the World Championships in Daegu.

All three received two-year bans after admitting doping.

“Today’s announcements underline the IAAF’s continued and unwavering campaign against doping in Athletics,” said IAAF president Lamine Diack. “They demonstrate the IAAF’s commitment to use advanced methods to detect doping and to enforce increased sanctions when justified. We will not stint in our resolve to do everything in our power to eradicate cheating.”