Athletes who tested positive for meldonium before March 1 "could have bans overturned less than four months before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics" after the World Anti-Doping Agency said it was unable to establish how quickly the drug, outlawed since Jan. 1, cleared the human body, according to Dmitriy Rogovitskiy of REUTERS. WADA's notice to national anti-doping bodies "is expected to have a major impact on many of the 172 athletes who have tested positive for the performance-boosting drug since January."
They include five-time grand slam tennis champion Maria Sharapova, "who was among 40 Russian athletes to test positive for the drug after it was added to WADA's list of banned substances in January."
WADA said that "there was a lack of clear scientific information on excretion times." WADA said in a statement,
"As a result it is difficult to know whether an athlete may have taken the substance before or after January 1, when it became illegal. In these circumstances, WADA considers that there may be grounds for no fault or negligence on the part of the athlete" (REUTERS, 4/13). The BBC's Matt Slater wrote in a statement, issued via the official news agency Tass, the Russian Sports Ministry said it "supports and welcomes the decision made by Wada because it has showed a willingness to understand the situation, rather than stick to the rulebook."
This follows recent comments from Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko that the meldonium crisis would soon be "settled."
Last week, the Int'l Biathlon Union said that "it would not be ruling on any cases until more was known about excretion rates for meldonium." Tom Bassindale, a forensic toxicologist and anti-doping scientist at Sheffield Hallam University, believes WADA "may have been too hasty in banning meldonium." He said,
"WADA did not have full information about how meldonium is processed by the body when imposing the ban" (BBC, 4/13).
A SECOND CHANCE: In London, Simon Briggs wrote Sharapova "could benefit from a partial WADA amnesty on meldonium -- the prohibited substance which triggered her bombshell news conference in March." The details of Sharapova's test are not known, but her lawyer, John Haggerty, said a month ago that one element of her defense would be based on low dosage levels -- "substantially less than any dosage that has been linked with performance-enhancing attributes." The date for the WADA hearing into Sharapova's case "has yet to be revealed but is expected to take place at some stage before the end of April." In certain cases, athletes will be advised that they can "return to competition pending further scientific investigations into the chemical." In other cases, "athletes could be cleared entirely" (TELEGRAPH, 4/13).
