The Island's Secret #1: The curious clenbuterol cases involving male Jamaican sprinters at Beijing 2008
During Olympic retesting, several Jamaican sprinters tested positive for clenbuterol. The cases were not 'reported', but Honest Sport finds a clenbuterol coach was moving in Jamaican sprint circles.
Every Monday and Thursday, I publish a press-round up of all the doping and sports medicine stories in the media from the past seven days. You can read an example of these round-ups here (link).
This Long read is the first article in a three-part series on doping, and drug trafficking, in Jamaican track and field.
You can read Part 2 (here) and Part 3 (here).
Twenty months before the start of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, a package was delivered to the doorstep of the Jamaican hurdler Adrian Findlay.
The shipment contained prohibited testosterone and the anabolic steroid oxandrolone, US investigators found. Over the same winter, two packages of HGH had arrived at the home address of another Jamaican hurdler, Deloreen Ennis-London.
Six months later, Ennis-London won a bronze medal in the 100m Hurdles at the 2007 World Athletics Championships. She then won bronze again in 2009.
Ennis-London still has those medals, and her results have never been annulled. Nor have those of the Jamaican 400m hurdler Adrian Findlay.
Both Ennis-London and Findlay, as an alternate, went on to form part of Jamaica’s track and field team at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Jamaica won a record eleven Olympic medals led by its gold medal winners Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Melaine Walker, Usain Bolt, Veronica Campbell-Brown, Asafa Powell and Nesta Carter.
But years later, journalists uncovered that several male Jamaican sprinters had been caught with the anabolic agent clenbuterol in their systems at those very same Olympics. These failed drugs tests, detected through retesting, were never officially ‘reported’, and the athletes were never formally required to defend themselves.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) maintained that pattern analysis had shown that the Jamaican positives had been likely caused by meat contamination during the Olympics in China. A pattern the IOC and WADA were willing to disregard was that banned hormones had been shipped to the homes of two members of Jamaica’s sprint team.
This is the story of the curious clenbuterol cases in male Jamaican sprinting at Beijing 2008.
