Tobi Amusan, who was temporarily banned from competition due to whereabouts violations, is after all free to compete in the World Championships in Budapest.
BUDAPEST. The Athletics Integrity Unit, the independent anti-doping body of the international athletics federation World Athletics, announced late Thursday evening that the Nigerian rower Tobi Amusan the temporary ban has been lifted.
Amusan, 26, was provisionally suspended by the AIU a month ago after he was deemed to have been out of reach of doping testers three times during the year.
Three missed tests are interpreted in the WADA rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency as a doping violation, for which the athlete will basically be banned for two years.
A statement released by the AIU said that the Disciplinary Committee released Amusan by a majority decision. In the same announcement, the director of AIU Brett Clothier expressed his disappointment with the outcome of the disciplinary committee. The decision is secret for the time being.
According to Clothier, the AIU is considering whether to exercise its right of appeal and take the case to the International Court of Appeal for Sport, CAS.
Terrible ME time
Amusa is especially remembered for last year’s World Championships in Oregon. He ran the two fastest times in 100m hurdles history there.
Amusan arrived at the Games with a record of 12.42. He ran a time of 12.40 in the preliminaries and a current world record of 12.12 in the semifinals.
In the final, Amusan ran even harder, 12.06, but the time did not qualify for ME due to the tailwind blowing 0.5 meters too hard.
Before being banned from competition, Amusan managed to run a time of 12.34 in June, with which she is the fourth fastest woman in the current season’s world statistics.
The World Athletics Championships start in Budapest, Hungary on Saturday. The preliminaries of the women’s 100-meter hurdles will be run next Tuesday, the semi-finals on Wednesday and the final on Thursday.
– I am excited that I can put this case behind me. I’m looking forward to defending the World Championship title next week, Amusan wrote on social media on Thursday evening.
An extraordinary decision
It is very rare that a breach of whereabouts information, i.e. a so-called whereabouts failures, the athlete suspended from competition is acquitted.
In a recently published article, Urheilu went through how the AIU has noted the number of whereabouts violations among star-caliber track and field athletes in the United States. You can read the article at this link.