Sprinting's latest doping scandal is bad timing in a sport that can't afford more controversy

CBC

21-03-2025

Social Sharing
The news that Gerald Phiri, the retired Olympic sprinter and current head track coach at the Montverde Academy in Florida, had been provisionally suspended by World Athletics' Athletics Integrity Unit following a doping investigation seemed to come out of nowhere.
It hit the Internet on a slow sports news Tuesday, early in the week leading up to the World Indoor Championships, but still deep in track and field's preseason. Many of the sport's biggest stars skipped indoor meets this winter. Most won't start their outdoor campaigns until deeper into the spring.
As for the allegations – AIU maintains that Phiri has possessed a pair of prohibited substances, Cardarine and meldonium, at various points in recent years, while three of his teenage athletes tested positive for Cardarine in 2023 and 2024. They also claim that Phiri provided "false and inaccurate information" to investigators.
But when we remember that Phiri's most famous protogégé was Issam Assinga, the teenage phenom who rewrote the sprint record book in 2023 before flunking a doping test ahead of that year's world championships, we realize that these new sanctions, while unexpected, aren't surprising.
Two years ago, Assinga looked like the future. He won a national high school title indoors, and early in the outdoor season he outran Noah Lyles – yes, that Noah Lyles – over 100 metres. But that positive test in late summer turned the sport's latest feel-good story into the biggest doping scandal of the year.
The screening, conducted in July of 2023, revealed the presence of GW1516 Sulfoxide, a banned drug also known as Cardarine, but also raised questions about how the substance wound up in the teenager's system. Tuesday's revelation fills in some blanks but doesn't quite provide answers.
This early in the year it's still not clear how news of Phiri's provisional suspension will affect the 2025 outdoor season from a marketing standpoint. The sport is set to welcome new competitions like Grand Slam Track, while a proposed showdown between Lyles and Tyreek Hill could help keep track on the mainstream sports radar in a non-Olympic year.
But before we can discuss any of those developments, we're stuck dealing with this one.
Track and field, after all, is not the NFL, where it's understood that players will take Toradol shots to numb pain before games, and where we just don't ask how players get bigger and faster and stronger and leaner every year.
And it's not the NHL, where Aaron Ekblad of the Florida Panthers can earn a 20-game PED suspension without us ever learning what substance triggered the sanction. Assinga's on the shelf for four years after a first offence. Ekblad can return during the postseason. This year.
In track and field, failed drug screenings are treated as systemic problems, symptoms of a culture that prizes results over fairness. As far as mainstream sports fans are concerned, one athlete's positive test makes every athlete a suspect.
So the news about Phiri isn't just a case of a coach getting rapped for obstructing an anti-doping investigation. It's one more drug scandal for a sport that can't afford more PED controversy.
Unfortunate timing for the sport
In one sense, the timing of this news is fortunate for the track and field business. The outdoor World Championships are still nearly six months away, and most big-name sprinters are still at least six weeks away from opening their seasons. But the callback to the doping drama that short-circuited the career of a promising teenager is particularly unwelcome this spring.
Last Sunday, 17-year-old Australian sprint sensation Gout Gout ran 20.05 seconds in the 200 metres, then followed up that run with a wind-aided 19.98.
The previous day Maurice Gleaton Jr., a two-sport star from Georgia, ran a wind-aided 10.01 to win the 100 metres at a high school meet in Florida.
A week before that Brayden Williams, with the help of a slightly-stronger-than-legal tailwind, ran 9.99 at a high school competition in his native Texas
We don't know for sure if any of those guys will grow up to run 9.7 and win Olympic gold, but one of them might. Or maybe one of the guys trailing Williams in Texas is a late bloomer who'll overtake all the big names four years from now.
Point is, those epic early season sprints have propelled those athletes out of the track world's bubble and into the consciousness of everyday sports fans on social media. Their feats have both hardcore fans and the casuals who drop in for the Olympics feeling good about the sport's next generation of stars.
And now comes Tuesday's news, a reminder, wrapped in a Catch-22.
Mainstream fans and media can't trust that track and field is clean unless people test positive, but every positive test is also taken as proof that the sport's highest achievers might be doping.
In 2023 here came Assinga, a high school senior who ran a wind-aided 9.83 to beat Lyles in the spring. Later that summer he posted a wind-legal 9.89. winning the South American championships and setting the U20 world record that has since been disallowed. His positive test went public a week before that year's world championships, where, by the numbers, he looked like a medal contender in the 100 metres.
WATCH | Assinga beats Lyles, running wind-aided 9.83 time:
In the immediate aftermath, Assinga blamed the Gatorade gummies he had eaten post-race a few weeks earlier. His lawyers later offered up the actual jar of gummies as proof, along with paperwork confirming that the candies contained traces of the banned drug. Last summer Assinga sued Gatorade, arguing that the gummies were tainted at the source.
That explanation always seemed sketchy. Without samples from another sealed container, with the same lot and batch number as Assinga's gummies, we can't tell if the drugs came from the factory, or from after-the-fact tampering.
Also, why would Gatorade doctor their own mass-market product with an expensive, possibly cancer-promoting black market drug? If the rule of law still applies in the U.S., it's a good way to get prosecuted, fined, and set up for a class action suit. As a business strategy, it's puzzling.
Tuesday's news moves us a little closer to a solution.
Phiri, after all, had three teenage athletes training under his supervision test positive for the same substance, but only Assinga blamed Gatorade. The AIU news release doesn't draw specific conclusions about how those teenagers all wound up with the same banned drug in their system, but it does lead the reader in a specific direction. Either those athletes had really bad luck with post-workout gummies, or something was happening between teenagers, that substance, and their coach.
We don't know which of those scenarios is true, but we know which of them makes sense.