Meanwhile in Egypt …
In rather sad news, my favorite lifter and friend, Mohamed Ehab announced his retirement from professional weightlifting 🙁
Egypt recently received an 18 moths long country ban, for doping violations stemming back to 2016, when seven youth athletes failed their tests. In addition to that it was also just announced that 5 more Egyptian weightlifters failed tests (Sara Ahmed among them) at African games.
Because of that there is no way for Mohamed to take part in the required qualification events, thus effectively destroying his dream of Tokyo 2020.
ATG has followed Mohamed’s journey since 2013 when I first posted about him, visited him in 2016 during his Rio Olympics preparation and planned to do another pre-olympic visit, which of course is not going to happen now. Sad times.
Sad to hear he is retired. He was exciting to watch.
On the other hand I think it is good they are enforcing the rules of the sport. I don’t know what the youths were caught using, can’t find any info on the IWF web page about this. But that’s one of the main reasons doping should be stopped. There is no need to force medical substances on young people.
It is exceptionally rare for a star athlete to truly retire without being forced to do so by physical injury. My bet its he’ll be back in 2021.
I guess he will back to competition, Lu Xiaojun showed the world that no lifter should stop until 36 years old.
I sure hope so. He will be back in 89 though and breaks some soft WRs.
A very sad and rough situation for Mohamed. But it is exactly what those rules were put in place to do. Create collateral damage for nations that dope and get caught too frequently. But I feel bad for him. He trained with incredible dedication.
Exactly right on all points, totally agree.