Lizzy Banks, a professional women’s cyclist who had failed a drugs test and was eventually given a two-year ban, says she struggled to watch Jannik Sinner play the Wimbledon final.
“I can’t tell you how difficult it was to watch Wimbledon this year. I watched the men’s final and I didn’t expect it to hit me like that, I was so upset. I want to make it clear that I don’t think Jannik Sinner purposely took anything. He was given his zero-month sanction, like I was. It was appealed to CAS, like mine was. And then he got the most handy time, a three-month sanction, and then he was able to just go straight back to it,” Banks told The Times. “I was never even offered a deal, but I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.
Her reaction was because of how her own career played out because of that ban. Initially, she was given no ban as UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) had agreed that there had been contamination and it was no fault of hers. But WADA refused to accept the opinion of UKAD’s expert witness, professor David Cowan, and instead fought for and secured a two-year ban later.
Her ordeal began in May 2023 when she took a routine urine test that led to a positive finding for a diuretic called Chrortalidone, which she claims she had not even heard of before. Her conclusion, and which was supported by the professor Cowan after his investigations, was that one of medications she took to treat asthma or a pill she took after a dental treatment perhaps had been contaminated in the manufacturing process.
But CAS panel didn’t agree to her version and though they described her as a “peroson of integrity”, said that she was unable to prove the source of the contamination and hence warranted a ban, which was back-dated and is now served.
It’s for this reason that she struggled to watch Sinner play and win Wimbledon. “Then they came out and said this case [Sinner’s] is a million miles from doping. Well, how does that make me feel? Just because I’m little old me and nobody cares about me I have to go through hell, and he gets to go and win Wimbledon.”
She told The Times newspaper about how her life was completely upset after the ban. “I was an athlete of integrity who took the utmost care in her anti-doping responsibilities, who was unknowingly exposed to a contaminant-sized dose of an obsolete diuretic with an impossibility of tracing the source because of a 79-day delay. And so is that really proportional to my career being completely lost, my identity being lost, my health being destroyed for two years, my husband’s health being destroyed for two years, loss of earnings for two years, the impact that will have on other earnings in the future. Is that proportional?”
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
