Our firm represented a professional athlete who tested positive, following an in-competition doping control, for two prohibited substances, in appeal proceedings before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) brought by the competent national anti-doping organisation.
At first instance, the national anti-doping tribunal had excluded the athlete’s responsibility. The anti-doping prosecutor appealed to CAS, seeking a period of ineligibility of up to six years, arguing the athlete had failed to prove the violation was unintentional.
Acting for the athlete, we built the defence around expert and factual evidence establishing that the substances originated from a contaminated commercial supplement rather than from any deliberate or reckless conduct, coordinating independent laboratory analysis and expert testimony to reconstruct the pathway of ingestion.
Following a full hearing, the CAS Panel found that the athlete had established, on the balance of probability, that the substances came from a contaminated product and that his degree of fault was normal rather than considerable.
As a result, the Panel imposed a period of ineligibility of only eight months, substantially below the sanction sought on appeal and largely covered by the provisional suspension already served, and ordered the anti-doping organisation to bear a significant share of the arbitration costs.
This case highlights the value of a scientifically grounded, well-evidenced defence strategy in achieving a proportionate outcome in contamination-based doping cases before CAS.
