IOC president Thomas Bach calls for tough fight against 'doping', pledges USD 10 million

International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach on Tuesday pledged USD 10 million to support a four-point action plan aimed at strengthening the fight against doping in sports.

In addition to this new plan, the IOC President also insisted on the need for better cooperation with governments when it comes to identifying and sanctioning those in the athletes' entourage involved in doping cases.

"To make this step possible, the IOC is ready to finance the necessary storage facilities for the International Federations and National Anti-Doping Orgsations for the tens of thousands of samples collected during the pre-Games testing period. Based on our experience with the storage, this represents a commitment by the IOC of about USD 5 million," Bach said in an official statement.

One half of USD 10 million will go towards storing samples from Pre-Olympics testing for 10 years while the other half will go towards research and investigation.

The IOC president has also asked the International Testing Agency (ITA), "to collect the appropriate samples to be analysed by the new genetic sequencing method as early as the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, regardless of whether this testing method is already fully validated or not".

Bach also outlined the increased support from the IOC to anti-doping since the last WADA World Conference in Johannesburg.

"Since we met last time in Johannesburg, the IOC has taken some more important initiatives. One of the major milestones was the initiation of the International Testing Agency by the Olympic Summit in 2015. The creation of the ITA was made possible by start-up funding of USD 30 million from the IOC. The overarching goal of the ITA is to make anti-doping testing independent from sports orgsations. In today's world, where perception is unfortunately so often becoming reality, it is more important than ever to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest," Bach said.

"We have also increased our financial support to WADA. Together with the governments, we have approved a 47 per cent cumulative budget increase from about USD 30 million in 2017 to about USD 44 million in 2022," he added.

( With inputs from ANI )