Is Sports Integrity Australia right to oppose Shayna Jack’s reduced penalty for testing positive to a banned PED?

Hence, it is not surprising that there were 62 positive cases for Ligandrol in 2019.

Similarly, Sport Integrity Australia is not wrong when it does not rule out the possibility of microdosing, in line with a 2018 WADA study that points to athletes taking a very small dose of a PED frequently and timely to escape detection.

But the Court of Arbitration could not rule out unintentional ingestion, with the possibility of innocence being consistent with reduced bans in recent years.

There is whole lot of evidence to support the reduced ban in line with the reality of accidental ingestion given that improved testing can now detect drugs on the scale of one dissolved sugar cube “in enough water to fill 45 Olympic swimming pools”.  

First, while WADA’s policy of strict liability makes an athlete responsible for banned substances found in one’s body regardless of his or her intention, it is also the case that innocence or a reduced penalty may result if reasonable doubt about intention is demonstrated.

After all, WADA statistics (2013–2017) show that between 4% and 19% of positive tests were not sanctioned as athletes were exonerated for reasons that included dietary supplement or meat contamination (Walpurgis, Thomas, Geyer, Mareck and Thevis, ‘Dietary Supplement and Food Contaminations and Their Implications for Doping Controls’, Foods 2020, 9, 1012 doi:10.3390/foods9081012).

Second, with Jack testing negative in nine tests from February 2018 prior to her positive test of 26 June 2019, it would be rather odd that Jack could now somehow miscalculate the timing.

Third, as noted by Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA): “You'd actually have to be a fool if you're an intentional cheater to use LGD 4033 because it's easy to detect. So I don’t think any intentional cheater who knows what they’re doing. None of them are using these substances.”

A 2018 publication notes that LGD‐4033 metabolites were detected up to 21 days later in urine samples.

The reality is that smart athletes who want to cheat are likely to do so with PEDs that are synthetic versions of natural hormones, as noted in a 2019 article which illustrated the ongoing “cat-and-mouse game between athletes and anti-doping officials” as “they tweak their strategies to try to evade detection” with regard to erythropoietin, growth hormone, and testosterone as it “can be challenging to distinguish and because there is a wide range of “normal” levels for these compounds and their associated metabolites.

Fourth, there is no perfect testing yet to rule out the accidental ingestion of products that may turn up in supplements.

While USADA since 2016 (to 2019) had handed out five sanctions involving LGD-4033 and 38 sanctions involving another SARM known as Ostarine, their presence in even reputable supplement brands had led to sanctions much less than four years, with the most recent a nine-month ban for karate athlete Joane Orbon who proved supplement contamination.