Can’t handle World Cup drug testing: Brazil

With one lab suspended and its replacement unfinished, Brazil won’t be able to handle drug testing for the 2014 World Cup alone and is looking overseas for help, the executive director of the country’s anti-doping authority said on Thursday.

With one lab suspended and its replacement unfinished, Brazil won’t be able to handle drug testing for the 2014 World Cup alone and is looking overseas for help, the executive director of the country’s anti-doping authority said on Thursday.

In an interview, Marco Aurelio Klein said that Brazil’s new doping lab in Rio de Janeiro should be up and running a year ahead of the 2016 Olympics.

But the lab won’t be ready for the World Cup next June and July, he said. The existing Rio lab that Brazil was expecting to use had its accreditation revoked last month by the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA cited “repeated failures” by the facility. Without accreditation, the lab isn’t authorized to do WADA-recognized anti-doping activities. Klein called the lab’s loss of accreditation a “disaster.”