Biathlete Fourcade awarded sixth Olympic gold 15 years later / Photo: Don EMMERT - AFP/File
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Biathlete Fourcade awarded sixth Olympic gold 15 years later
French biathlete Martin Fourcade, who retired in 2020, will be awarded a sixth Olympic title following the decision to uphold the doping conviction of Russia's Evgeny Ustyugov, the IOC announced on Friday.
France's most decorated Olympian, Fourcade adds to his golden haul as the new winner of the mass start at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the race that brought him to prominence at the age of just 22.
He "will have the opportunity" to receive his gold medal during the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Kirsty Coventry told the press.
The decision by the Olympic body's executive committee, meeting in Milan, had been expected since last May's rejection of Ustyugov's final appeal against his disqualification for doping, due to anomalies in his biological passport.
In October 2020, the Russian was stripped of all his results between 2010 and 2014, including the mass start in Vancouver.
Fourcade, who has been a member of the IOC since 2022, has five other Olympic gold medals to his name -- individual and pursuit in 2014, pursuit, mass start and mixed relay in 2018, as well as silver in the mass start at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
Over the course of his 11-year career, he also won the overall World Cup a record seven times and collected 28 world championship medals, including 13 golds, before retiring in March 2020.
V.Barbieri--IM
