China is in danger of being placed on a one-year ban by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) after re-tests of samples from the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing revealed that three of its female weightlifters tested positive for prohibited substances.
The IOC said that the three Chinese weightlifters, Cao Lei (75kg), Chen Xiexia (48 kg) and Liu Chunhong (69kg), who were likewise stripped of their 2008 Olympic gold medals, tested positive for GHRP-2, which stimulates the production of growth hormone.
The silver medalists in these divisions who are from Taiwan, Russia and Kazakhstan could be upgraded to gold medalists if they passed the doping re-tests.
The IWF warned last year that countries with three or more failed drugs re-tests of the Beijing and London Olympics would be automatically banned for a year from all international competitions.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is keeping samples from past Games for up to a decade to be able to conduct re-tests with newer methods to detect steroids and other banned substances being used several weeks instead of several days before a urine sample was given.
So far over 100 doping offenders have been caught in re-tests of doping samples from the Beijing and London Games, with most cases coming from Russians.
The IOC also stripped Nadzeya Ostapchuk of Belarus of her bronze medal in women's shot put in the Beijing Olympics. Ostapchuk had earlier lost her gold medal and from the 2012 London Games after testing positive in a separate anti-doping test.
The four medalists were among eight new disqualifications in the latest round of re-tests of samples stored from the Beijing and London Olympics.
The four non-medalists who tested positive for anabolic steroids in the Beijing Olympics included fourth-placers Darya Pchelnik of Belarus in women's hammer throw, who tested positive for turinabol, and Turkish weightlifter Sibel Simsek in the women's 63kg, who was found to have used turinabol and stanozolol.
The other non-medallists were lifters from the men's 94kg class, who were both disqualified for turinabol: of the sixth-placer from Azerbaijan, Intigam Zairov; and the 11th-placer from Armenia, Norayr Vardanyan.