KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – Four Jamaican athletes have admitted to taking a banned substance and are now awaiting sanctions from the Jamaica Appeals Tribunal.
The Jamaica Anti-Doping Appeals Tribunal met on Wednesday but while they freed Sheri-Ann Brooks, the fifth athlete implicated in the drugs scandal last month, they set aside September 14 to sanction Yohan Blake, Marvin Anderson, Allodin Fothergill and Lansford Spence,
Chairman of the Appeals Tribunal, retired Appeals Court judge Justice Ransford Langrin confirmed the development.“The athletes have agreed they took a banned substance,” he said.
“We have to decide now what is the sanction we apply … and the minimum sanction is reprimand or up to two years of ineligibility.”
CMC Sports understands that the athletes admitted taking the banned substance to prevent enduring a protracted case, and in hope the Appeals Tribunal will impose a minor sanction. “There were some efforts to resolve the thing with the JADCO and the athletes because of what may happen,” attorney-at-Law Lincoln Eatmon, a member of the legal team for the five athletes, said in an interview with the Jamaica Observer.
“We have no control over what WADA or the IAAF (athletics world governing body) might do so even if the athletes are found ‘not guilty’, the prospect of them facing a lengthy, expensive battle to go to arbitration on all that … it was felt that we should try to resolve the thing as amicably as possible.”
The Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission announced last month that all four athletes had been found with the substance 4-Methyl-2-hexanamine in their urine samples.
However, the Jamaica Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel, chaired by Kent Gammon, cleared the athletes after the panel found there was not enough evidence to support the claims.
The saga took another twist when JADCO appealed on the grounds that the substance in question was considered by the World Anti-Doping Agency to be of “similar chemical structure to tuaminoheptane which is listed as an example of a stimulant in the WADA 2009 prohibited list international standard.”
The case then went before the Appeals Tribunal.
