More than 60 athletes, including Olympic medalists and world champions, have tested positive this year for meldonium, the performance-enhancing drug that Maria Sharapova admitted to using, according to antidoping officials.
Meldonium, originally developed in Latvia for heart patients, aids blood flow and is not approved for sale in the United States. It was placed on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list this year after being monitored by agency in 2015.
“Regarding the number of Meldonium positives, I can tell you that it was at 60 adverse analytical findings (since January 1st) recorded on Monday and that number is growing,” Ben Nichols, a spokesman for the World Anti-Doping Agency, said in an email message.
Most of the athletes who have tested positive have not been publicly identified because all the cases are still being adjudicated. Besides Sharapova, other athletes to test positive include: Semion Elistratov of Russia, an Olympic gold medalist in short-track speedskating; Pavel Kulizhnikov of Russia, a world champion speedskater; Davit Modzmanashvili of Georgia, an Olympic silver medalist in wrestling; and Abeba Aregawi of Sweden, a world champion runner.
When asked Thursday if he was surprised by the high number of athletes who have been caught since the ban, David Howman, WADA’s director general, said, “We are not really at any stage surprised when a substance is put on the list and all of the sudden there are positive cases.”
“The reason for it being on the list is it’s being used and has been used to enhance people’s performance, and that was the reason for this substance first to be monitored for 12 months,” he added. “There was ample warning if you like given when it was put on the monitoring list in 2014 for people to say, hey, we have to be careful here. And they weren’t.”
Howman resisted attributing the wave of positive tests largely to negligence.
“I don’t know if you can say what any main reason is,” he said. “We’ve got to wait for the cases to run their course and see what athletes are saying, and you’ve got to give them the opportunity of being heard, and I think we stand by that process.”
Sharapova, the 28-year-old tennis star and commercial powerhouse who is the most prominent athlete affected so far, made her case public on Monday by announcing that she had failed a test for meldonium and attributing the result to being unaware that it had been placed on the banned list.
She has taken full responsibility for being unaware and is not contesting the finding. Sharapova said her family doctor began prescribing the drug mildronate, also known as meldonium, in 2006 after several health issues arose. Her lawyer, John Haggerty, has said that Sharapova was unaware the drug had performance-enhancing capabilities.
“I was getting sick very often,” she said. “I had a deficiency in magnesium. I had irregular EKG results, and I had a family history of diabetes and there were signs of diabetes.”
Nichols said in an email on Monday that meldonium had been moved from the monitored list to the banned list “because of evidence of its use by athletes with the intention of enhancing performance.”
One factor in its change in status was a 2015 study, funded in part by the Partnership for Clean Competition, that analyzed 8,300 urine samples collected at doping control sessions and found that 182 (2.2 percent) contained the substance.
A study of last year’s European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan, published Wednesday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found an “alarmingly high prevalence of meldonium use by athletes.” According to the study, 13 winners or medalists were taking meldonium, and 66 athletes tested positive for it.
Growth in the use of meldonium was a subject of the latest documentaryfrom the German network ARD, which first reported on systematic Russian doping in 2014. The investigation cited a 2015 Russian study that found meldonium in 17 percent of 4,316 urine samples tested.
Dr. Steven Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said that the drug seemed to be used to treat chest pains from severe heart disease.
“There is no way it would be clinically indicated in a healthy young athlete,” he said.
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