Nigeria’s 100 metres hurdles world record holder, Tobi Amusan, says she has been charged by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) with missing three doping tests.
It leaves the participation of the 26-year-old at next month’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest hanging in the balance.
Amusan claimed, though, that she has never used banned performance-enhancing drugs and expects to be cleared in time for the World Championships, due to open in the Hungarian capital on August 19.
“I am a clean athlete, and I am regularly, (maybe more than the usual) tested by the AIU.I was tested within days of my third ‘missed test’,” Amusan wrote on her Instagram page.
“I have faith that this will be resolved in my favour and that I will be competing at the world championships in August.”
Amusan revealed that her case will be decided by a tribunal of three arbitrators.
Under World Athletics anti-doping rules, the applicable sanction for three whereabouts failures is two years’ ineligibility, subject to a reduction to a minimum of one year depending on an athlete’s degree of fault.
The AIU officially confirmed the charge a few hours after Amusan’s post.
Amusan’s announcement came just a few hours after she had won the women’s 100m hurdles at the World Athletics Continental Tour Gold meeting in Szekesfehervar in Hungary.
Her time of 12.35sec was just 0.01 seconds off her season’s best set on Sunday (July 16) when she won at the World Athletics Diamond League meeting in Silesia in Poland.
Amusan had lowered the world record from 12.20 to 12.12 in the semi-finals of last year’s World Championships in Eugene in the United States.
She won the final in 12.06 later that day, but that time did not count for record purposes because there was too much tailwind.
American sprint legend, Michael Johnson, had questioned Amusan’s performances while working for BBC Television in Eugene.
Her run beat the previous world record – set by Johnson’s compatriot Kendra Harrison in 2016 – by 0.08 seconds and was three-tenths of a second quicker than she had ever run before.
The semi-finals also produced 12 personal bests and five national records, which were at the root of Johnson’s concerns.
Experts claimed that Amusan’s record came as a result of her Adizero Avanti Tyo Tinman Elite shoes, manufactured by Adidas and designed for distance running rather than sprinting.
The soles contain a layer of carbon rods and foam which led to questions over whether the shoes had given her an unfair advantage at Hayward Field. –Insidethegames.biz
