Levine left facing two-year ban after failed drugs test
Nigel Levine, the double Olympic sprinter, is facing a doping ban after British Athletics announced that he had been provisionally suspended for failing a drugs test.
News of Levine’s failed test first emerged in December, in the highest-profile doping case to hit British athletics for a decade.
The 400m runner had been planning his competitive comeback after breaking his pelvis in a serious motorbike accident in January 2017. However, he failed a test for a substance, believed to be clenbuterol, and is now fighting to salvage his athletics career.
UK Athletics said Levine could respond to the charge and had the right to a full hearing of the case.
Levine, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in Northamptonshire, has been a mainstay of the British 4x400 team since making his senior international debut in 2009.
He has twice won European relay gold medals and made it on to three world indoor podiums as part of British 4x400m teams, but his career was thrown into doubt when the motorbike he was riding with team-mate James Ellington collided with a car while on a British Athletics training camp.
The accident left him in hospital for weeks, while Ellington is yet to return to sprinting after suffering life-threatening injuries. Speaking about the decision to retain Levine on top-level funding last November, UK Athletics performance director, Neil Black, said: “Nigel’s recovery from that accident is at an advanced stage in terms of his ability to compete again.
“As such, we are able to retain him on the World Class Performance Programme in his capacity as a relay athlete.”
British athletics has been largely free of high-profile failed drugs tests since Dwain Chambers was banned for two years after he tested positive for multiple substances in 2003.
Former 100m hurdler Callum Priestley had been considered to be one of the country’s most exciting track prospects until he tested positive for clenbuterol in 2010, and then quit the sport after he was handed a two-year ban.
Clenbuterol is used primarily in the treatment of asthma and other breathing disorders, but has performance-enhancing qualities as a weight-loss drug.
The most famous case involving clenbuterol saw Spain’s Alberto Contador stripped of his 2010 Tour de France title after testing positive for the substance.