100-meter champion will miss Olympics
Coleman receives ban for missing three doping tests
Christian Coleman, the reigning world champion in the 100 meters, will miss the Tokyo Olympics after the top judicial body in sport punished him with an 18-month ban from competition for missing three doping tests within a year.
The penalty, handed down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, is a major blow for Coleman, 25, a rising star in track and field and the best U.S. hope to win a gold medal in an event that Usain Bolt, who is now retired, dominated for more than a decade.
The start of the ban was backdated to May 14, 2020, which means it will run through mid-November. The Athlete Integrity Unit, which handles anti-doping discipline for World Athletics, the sport’s governing body, originally suspended Coleman for two years. The panel for the sports court reduced the sentence by six months because it found “the athlete’s degree of negligence to be lower than that established in the Challenged Decision.”
“He’s disappointed by the decision and missing the Olympics, but he’s not stopping,” Seth Coleman, Christian’s father, said during an interview Friday. “He hasn’t been sitting around on the couch during all this.”
Indeed Coleman, who won the gold medal in the 100 meters at the 2019 World Athletics Championships when he ran 9.76, was at practice Friday morning in Kentucky and unavailable for comment. Coleman’s father said his son plans to compete during next year’s indoor season and defend his world championship next year in Eugene, Ore.
Coleman’s case shows how substantial penalties can be even for athletes who do not test positive for performance-enhancing drugs.
Coleman has never failed a drug test. He was tested 13 times in 2019, and anti-doping officials have said they have no reason to suspect that he uses performanceenhancing drugs. But three times in 2019, Coleman was not where he said he would be during the one hour each day when anti-doping officers were supposed to be able to test him.
The rules require athletes, at the beginning of each quarter, to give antidoping officials a schedule of where they plan to be each day for the next three months. Athletes can update their files as their plans change but must specify one hour each day when they will be at a certain location, sometime between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m. local time.
If a doping control officer shows up during that hour to collect a urine or blood sample and the athlete is not there, it counts as a missed test. Officers must make a “reasonable attempt” to locate the athlete during that hour, though a phone call is not mandatory.
Coleman’s final strike occurred on Dec. 9, 2020, when two doping control officers arrived at his home in a gated community in Lexington, Ky., at 7:09 p.m. Coleman had said he would be home from 7:15 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. Instead of calling Coleman’s home on the security keypad, which Coleman contended he would have heard, they walked through an open gate and knocked on his door.
Coleman did not answer. The officers waited for an hour and left.
Coleman testified that he was out Christmas shopping and picking up a takeout meal near his home during the hour and that if a doping control officer had called he could have gotten home within five minutes, even though that is not how the process works.
In a statement, the court noted that Coleman should have been on “high-alert on that day, given the two existing whereabouts failures against him.” The court said, though, that if the officers had called Coleman, he would have been able to return home within the 60minute window. A phone call, the panel noted, is “a matter of standard practice among other Doping Control Officers.”
Coleman’s absence creates a wide-open race for the three U.S. spots in the 100-meter field at the Tokyo Games, which is always one of the toughest events to qualify for from the United States. Justin Gatlin was the last U.S. champion in the event, in 2004, but Gatlin has sullied that gold medal with two bans for doping during his career.