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maltatoday, SUNDAY, 10 APRIL 2016 57 Sport OLYMPICS WEIGHTLIFTING FOURTIMES Olympic breaststroke cham- pion Kosuke Kitajima is set for retirement after missing out on qualifying for a fifth Olympics at the Japanese swimming trials. The 33-year-old, who won 100 and 200 me- tre breaststroke gold at the 2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing Games, could only clock a time of 2 minutes 9.96 seconds to finish fifth in the 200m and outside of the required time to make the Rio Olympics. Kitajima, who also won Olympic silver at the London 2012 Games and two bronze in Ath- ens and Beijing in the 4x100m medley, was given a warm applause after leaving the Tokyo pool on Friday at the national championships. "The result was not good but I was able to swim once again with a feeling of determina- tion to go to the Olympics. It hurts but I gave it my best shot," he was quoted as saying by Kyodo News. Triple world champion Kitajima had already missed out on a spot in the relay team at the Aug. 5-21 Games in Brazil but said he was un- decided on retirement plans. "My aim was to make the Olympics. That is over now and I would not be able to give a proper answer if I spoke for the next few min- utes about what I am going to do next, so I'd like to be allowed to refrain from comment- ing," he said. Japan's Kitajima misses out on fifth Olympics, set to retire Japan's Kosuke Kitajima Weightlifting could hand doping control to WADA WEIGHTLIFTING took a sig- nificant step on Friday towards becoming the first sport to hand over control of its governing federation's anti-doping pro- gramme to WADA, after endur- ing six months of relentless bad publicity. The congress of the European Weightlifting Federation (EWF), meeting in Forde, Norway, vot- ed unanimously in favour of a proposal to transfer the sport's worldwide doping control sys- tem to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The global governing body, the International Weightlifting Fed- eration (IWF), will vote on Eu- rope's proposal in June. "Four or five years ago I was laughed at when I suggested this should happen," said Christian Baumgartner, the German scien- tist, and president of his nation's weightlifting federation, who proposed the change. "There was not enough fund- ing at WADA and there was no political will." Recent revelations of systemic cheating in a range of sports prompted the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to announce last December that it was in favour of making anti- doping independent of all Olym- pic sports. If doping control was handed over to WADA then the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), sport's highest court, would be given the task of imposing sanc- tions on those who fail tests. "Weightlifting is leading the way in this respect," said Baum- gartner. "I did not imagine, a few years ago, that I would be saying that. "I am sure our international federation will adopt the pro- posal in June." When the IWF announced it had banned Bulgaria from the 2016 Olympic Games in Novem- ber, after 11 of their lifters test- ed positive at a training camp, it was the start of a long run of negative publicity. At November's world champi- onships in Texas, there were 24 positive tests -- about 10 percent of all samples taken -- including the Russian super-heav y weight (+105kg) winner Alexei Lovchev, who had set two world records. Olympic champion Kim Un- guk of North Korea also tested positive at the worlds as well as 22-year-old Valentin Hristov, a Bulgarian-born lifter who was competing for Azerbaijan and had already served a two-year ban for an earlier offence. Former world champion An- drei Rybakov from Belarus was this month provisionally sus- pended after becoming the first weightlifter to test positive for meldonium. Organisers of the European championships, which start in Forde on Sunday, are desperate for some good publicity. The competition, in which about a quarter of the near-400 competitors can expect to be tested, is one of the last big events in the Olympic qualifica- tion cycle. "People outside the sport know weightlifting for the wrong rea- sons, only for all the positive tests," said Antonio Urso, the Italian who was re-elected presi- dent of the EWF on Friday. "We need to change the image of weightlifting, to promote our heroes. We must focus more on the human side of our top ath- letes." Among those who, Urso hopes, will provide good news in Forde is Tatiana Kashirina, the Russian world champion in the women's heaviest category (+75kg). Ka- shirina is close to becoming the first woman to lift 200kg.