Olympic champ Wayde pulls out of race after Covid-19 fiasco

● An apparent false positive for Covid-19 has scuppered the start of Wayde van Niekerk’s season.

On Friday, the Olympic 400m champion was told he was positive for the disease and was forced into self-isolation at his hotel in Gemona, Italy.

By yesterday afternoon, a second test had declared him negative, but it was too late for him to line up in the one-lap event for his first run on foreign soil since the 2017 world championships.

Positive one day, negative the next. That’s Italy for you — the flip-flopping nation that fought on both sides in World War II.

Sprint king Akani Simbine is scheduled to fly out today to join the training camp.

The positive result had come as a shock to Van Niekerk and his contingent, made up of coach tannie Ans Botha, long-jumper Ruswahl Samaai, hurdler Antonio Alkana, his agent Peet van Zyl and his physio.

All of them had been tested four times since, before leaving SA two weeks ago. They were tested just before departing SA and immediately after arriving in Gemona and twice more after that. All the results came back negative, except for Van Niekerk’s.

The positive result caught them by surprise. They were all in quarantine on the same floor of their hotel, leaving only to train at the nearby track.

Van Niekerk was feeling healthy, having recovered from a bout of sinusitis the week before, which he noted was a regular occurrence every time he arrived there from Bloemfontein.

What really surprised them, however, was that none of the other SA contingent had tested positive, not even the physio who had worked on Van Niekerk daily.

Van Niekerk insisted on another test, which came back negative yesterday.

But with more protocols and further medical tests required, it was too late to make the starting line at the meet in Trieste, about 100km south of his Gemona training base.

The news of his positive test spread rapidly. The ink had barely dried on the test result when the Italian media pounced on the story, proclaiming him infected and unable to compete. By late yesterday afternoon, it wasn’t known if it was a false positive or if maybe there were antibodies from an earlier undetected infection.

While Italy was ravaged by the pandemic earlier this year, Gemona was relatively unscathed, with only 11 recorded infections.

To date, only one SA Olympic medallist has tested positive for the virus, triathlete Henri Schoeman.

He recently tweeted that he had contracted Covid-19 twice, “less than 10 months apart”.

“It’s completely different to any cold or flu, you know when you have it. That was my experience at least.

“In ways it’s similar to my experience from my previous encounter. I’ve been completely out of training and trying to recover,” the bronze medallist from Rio 2016 tweeted last Sunday.