World 400m champion Salwa Eid Naser will miss out on Tokyo Olympics after two year ban
World 400m champion Salwa Eid Naser will miss the Tokyo Olympics after receiving a two-year ban for doping offences.
The ban will run from Wednesday, June 30, to early 2023, meaning that she will miss both the Olympics this year and the World Championships in the US next year.
Naser is currently the reigning women’s 400m world champion, having run 48.14 seconds to claim the title at the World Athletics Championships in Doha in 2019. While all her competitive results received from November 25, 2020 onwards will be disqualified, her world title will remain.
Under anti-doping rules athletes are required to keep authorities updated on their whereabouts and make themselves available for out-of-competition tests. Naser was originally charged with missing four such tests between January 1, 2019 and January 24, 2020, although one of these was withdrawn as the doping control officer had gone to the wrong address.
As the three other missed tests were not within a 12 month period, a tribunal said last year that they did not constitute a violation, before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld an appeal against that decision.
In a statement, CAS said the panel found Naser guilty of a violation of Article 2.4 of the IAAF Anti-Doping Rules: ‘Ms Salwa Eid Naser is sanctioned with a period of ineligibility of two years, commencing on 30 June 2021 with credit given for the period of provisional suspension already served between 4 June 2020 and 14 October 2020.
The statement added: ‘All competitive results obtained by Ms Salwa Eid Naser from 25 November 2019 through to the date of notification of the CAS award shall be disqualified, with all of the resulting consequences, including forfeiture of any medals, titles, ranking points and prize and appearance money.’
Naser was provisionally suspended in June before her charges were initially dismissed in October. According to The Guardian, she posted an Instagram Live video at the time in which she said: ‘I only missed three drug tests, which is normal. It happens. It can happen to anybody. I don’t want people to get confused in all this because I would never cheat.’
She added: ‘It’s very hard to have this little stain on my name. I would never take performance-enhancing drugs,” she added. “I believe in talent, and I know I have the talent.’ However her Instagram account appears to have been deleted since.
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