Over half of the 377 weightlifters at the world championships that begin on Tuesday in the United States will be drug tested as the sport begins a new chapter to try to retain its Olympic status.
By the time of the last lift on December 5 at the worlds in Anaheim, California, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will have begun deliberations on whether weightlifting should feature at the Paris 2024 Games.
In June the IOC asked for an IWF report by December on how the governing body plans to deal with doping. Unless it is deemed "satisfactory" at an IOC meeting in Lausanne on December 5-6, weightlifting will lose its Olympic status after Tokyo 2020.
"We accept that in the past the incidence of doping in weightlifting has been too high," says Hungarian Tamas Ajan, president of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) since 2000 and secretary general for 24 years before that.
The IWF will target "less than a dozen high-risk countries where there is an entrenched culture of doping that goes beyond weightlifting". The countries involved were not named.
Of the 49 weightlifting positives in the re-testing of samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics - more than any other sport - 43 were from nations formerly part of the Soviet Union.
Russia was banned from the Rio 2016 Games for repeated offences that "brought weightlifting into disrepute" and is also among the nine nations excluded from the world championships for having three or more of those 49 positives.
China is also banned from the world championships in Anaheim and, like Russia, has been accused of state-sponsored doping.
Russia, like the Chinese, has always denied any involvement in state-sponsored doping.
Under new rules approved by the IWF on Saturday, countries will face bans of up to four years "if they do not fulfil their anti-doping responsibilities", which would keep them out of the Olympics.
The IWF's anti-doping programme will be handed over to an Independent Testing Authority.
"Today marks the start of a new chapter for international weightlifting," said Ajan. "The Olympic Movement can trust that we are doing, and will continue to do, everything in our power to address the incidence of doping in our sport."
