This year’s Winter Olympics will officially get underway in Milan on Friday night
Bizarre allegations have surfaced on the eve of the Winter Olympics, with a newspaper report claiming male ski-jumpers are injecting their penises in a bid to improve their sporting performances.
The Games will officially get underway in Milan on Friday night, with the opening ceremony being held at the famous San Siro ahead of two weeks of action on the snow and ice. However, things have taken a strange twist ahead of the ceremony, after German newspaper Bild reported that jumpers were injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid before being measured for their suits.
When being measured for suits, data is taken by a 3D scanner from the lowest point of the subject’s genitals, with Bild claiming that jumpers are injecting their penises or putting clay in their underwear in an attempt to temporarily increase their measurements and make their suits looser.
While hyaluronic acid is not banned in sport, it can be used to increase penis circumference by as much as two centimetres.
If used by jumpers, it would in turn increase the surface area of their suits during competition, reducing their descent rate and increasing their length of flight in the air.
“Every extra centimetre on a suit counts,” Sandro Pertile, ski jumping men’s race director at the international ski and snowboard federation FIS, explained.
“If your suit has a 5% bigger surface area, you fly further.”
After Bild made the allegations – of which no hard proof has yet emerged – in a report in January, World Anti-Doping Agency director general Olivier Niggli was quizzed on the claims at a press conference ahead of the opening ceremony.
While he admitted he was unaware of the allegations, he added that the agency would be prepared to investigate if “anything was to come to the surface”.
“I’m not aware of the details of ski jumping – and how this can improve – but if anything was to come to the surface we would look at anything if it is actually doping related,” said Niggli.
“We don’t do other means of enhancing performance but our list committee would certainly look into whether this would fall into this category. But I hadn’t heard about that until you mentioned.”
WADA president Witold Banka smiled as he was asked about the allegations, adding: “Ski jumping is very popular in [his home country] Poland, so I promise you I’m going to look at it.”
The allegations come after two Olympic medallists were banned from the sport for three months in relation to the tampering of suits at the World Ski Championships in Norway last March.
It later transpired that the Norwegian pair of Marius Lindvik and Johann Andre Forfang were unaware of the tampering, but FIS said their team had “tried to cheat the system” by using reinforced thread in their suits.
However, both men are set to compete at this year’s Games, with the men’s ski jumping competition getting underway on Monday.