Bulgarian Sevdalin Marinov, who currently lives and work in Australia as a weightlifting coach, was banned for life from practising his profession. Marinov received the ban on June 19 after testing positive for doping substances. This was the second positive doping test for Marinov, a former three-time world champion, Olympic and Commonwealth gold medallist. He had previously tested positive for steroids in Bulgaria in 1995 before moving to Australia where he started working as a weightlifting coach. This is not the first time a Bulgarian weightlifting athlete has been caught using drugs. Doping and weightlifting in Bulgaria have become almost synonymous in the past 17 years. Even legendary weightlifting coach Ivan Abadjiev was banned from coaching for life because of the many incidents with his athletes. Under Abadjiev’s training, Bulgarian weightlifters have won 10 gold Olympic medals for Bulgaria.

One of the most controversial cases happened in 2000 during the Summer Olympics in Australia. After an special executive committee meeting of the International Weightlifting Federation, Bulgaria’s weightlifting team was expelled from the Olympics and suspended for a year after three of its lifters failed drugs tests. The three were women’s 48kg gold medallist Izabela Dragneva, Sevdalin Minchev, men’s 62kg bronze medallist and silver medallist Ivan Ivanov. The latter tested positive for banned diuretics in tests taken after the competitions at the Olympics.

Diuretics help to eliminate fluid from the body and are used by competitors to lose weight quickly in sports with weight categories.

They can also increase the rate at which urine is produced and eliminated to make it more difficult to detect banned substances.

Abadjiev was the head coach then.