Liberec, Czech Republic - More than 1,000 doping tests are conducted in connection with the upcoming Nordic skiing world championships, the ruling body FIS announced on Monday.

FIS said it conducted 508 blood and urine tests February 1-15 among athletes due to compete at the Liberec championships which start on Thursday and run until March 1.

Around 450 blood tests among all cross-country and Nordic combined skiers will take place in Liberec. There will also be 120 competition tests in the 20 events among the top four finishers and two athletes chosen randomly.

"The Nordic World Ski Championships feature one of the largest anti-doping programmes of any international major sports events outside of the Olympic Winter Games and underline the FIS position of zero tolerance on doping," FIS said in a statement.

German cross country coach Jochen Behle told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa: "I don't expect a positive doping test at these world championships. The tests have become decisively better.

"But given the caught Russian biathletes it is hard to believe that only biathletes are involved," said Behle in reference to the caught Russians Ekaterina Iourieva, Albina Akhatova and Dmitri Yaroshenko.

The FIS anti-doping commissioner Rasmus Damsgaard of Denmark said in a recent television interview with Germany's ARD network that around a hand full of blood screenings had suspicious results which could hint at doping.

"There could be a few positive cases which are just waiting to be detected," Damsgaard said in late December.

A blood pass for athletes was introduced in 2006 after cross-country skiing in particular was plagued by doping.

Six skiers from the home team Finland were caught using a forbidden blood volume expander at the Lahti worlds in 2001. German- born Spaniard Johann Muehlegg and Russians Olga Danilova and Larisa Lazutina failed doping tests at the 2002 Olympics.

The FIS said it was spending more than 1.5 million Swiss francs (1 million euros) on anti-doping measures in 2008-09, up one third from the 1 million Swiss francs from the
2007-08 season.

The FIS also announced figures of out-of-competition tests carried out May 1, 2008-February 1, 2009: 224 urine and 1,029 blood tests among cross-country skiers, and 15 urine and 83 blood tests among cross-country skiers.

In addition, athletes from the full spectrum of FIS sports (from alpine to freestyle skiing) underwent 175 random tests conducted by the World Anti Doping Agency, with testing done for a wide range of substances and methods including Human Growth Hormone and blood transfusions.

Further tests on ski athletes have been conducted by their respectable national anti-doping organization. (dpa)