Athletes warned kissing strangers and one-night stands risk drug bans

Telegraph

01-05-2025

Elite athletes have been warned that even a kiss, let alone a one-night stand with a stranger, could leave themselves open to a career-threatening anti-doping violation.
Arguing for a change in the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) code to raise the threshold for substances that can be transported 'through intimacy', Travis Tygart, who heads the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada), said that the current situation risked diverting resources away from catching real cheats.
Tygart, who oversaw the operation that exposed Lance Armstrong's US Postal cycling team, is regarded as one of the most foremost anti-doping crusaders in world sport, but he wants greater leniency in this area.
The tennis player Richard Gasquet once returned an anti-doping violation after kissing a woman in a nightclub who had been taking cocaine, but won his appeal after the woman herself corroborated his account.
Tygart, who was speaking at the annual Sport Resolutions conference in London, also cited an American boxer called Virginia Fuchs, who avoided a suspension after she was able to show that an adverse finding had been caused by sexual transmission from her male partner.
'With Gasquet, he managed to get her to come and give evidence to say, 'Yes, I use cocaine. I kissed him in this nightclub',' said Mark Hovell, a sports lawyer at Mills & Reeve.
Asked what would happen if an athlete had a kiss or one-night stand with someone they could not later track down, Hovell said: 'That's the problem – they might not have the evidence they need.'
Tygart said that it was 'pathetic' that athletes could be placed in this situation. 'I think based on the cases we've seen: watch who you kiss, watch out who you have an intimate relationship with,' Tygart said. 'I think it's a pretty ridiculous world we're expecting our athletes to live in, which is why we're pushing to try to change these rules to make it more reasonable and fair.
'The onus is always on the athletes – we as anti-doping organisations, need to take some of that responsibility back. And I worry how many of the intentional cheats are actually getting away because we're spending so much time and resources on the cases that end up being someone kissing someone at a bar.'
Tygart later explained that, as with some substances on the anti-doping code that are found in food, there were certain substances that can transfer between people through 'intimacy' and that it was simply a question of adjusting the minimum reporting level.
Wada dropped a lawsuit against Usada earlier this year after Tygart alleged a cover-up in the handling of 23 Chinese swimmers, who were cleared to compete at the Tokyo Olympics. The China Anti-Doping Agency (Chinada) had said that positive tests for the heart medication trimetazidine (TMZ) were caused by contamination, a finding that Wada said that it could not disprove. It defended its processes and accused Tygart of a 'completely false and defamatory' claim.
Tygart said on Thursday that China had still faced no consequences for a 'failure to follow the rules' and said that, according to a new study of the Tokyo and Paris Games, potentially 96 medals were impacted by the 23 swimmers who still competed.
'Until we get reasonable answers and honest answers, nobody should let it go away,' Tygart said. 'The big picture is you're talking 96 medals... 96 potential medals that the world deserves to know. And clean athletes certainly deserve to know.
'If we can't get Wada right, our athletes and others around the world are going to suffer by not having a fair and level playing field. We [the US in 2028] don't want to host a Sochi Olympic Games where dozens, if not more medals, are ultimately returned because the cheating was so rampant at those Games, as we now know.'
Chinada says that the swimmers had not broken anti-doping rules and that the results were caused by contamination.