LAUSANNE, February 26 – Jamaican athletics great Veronica Campbell-Brown is free to compete again after on Tuesday The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) confirmed the two-time Olympic 200m champion had been found not guilty of a doping violation.
The 31-year-old — only the second woman athlete after East German Barbel Wockel (1976/80) to win successive 200m Olympic titles when she won in 2004 and 2008 — missed last year’s outdoor world championships after she tested positive for a banned diuretic, hydrochlorothiazide, last May.
Campbell-Brown — who was one of several high profile Jamaican athletes to fail drugs tests last year with former men’s 100m world record holder Asafa Powell among them — is likely to compete at next month’s World Indoor Championships in Sopot, Poland, where she will bid to make it a hat-trick of 60m titles.
For Campbell-Brown — a two-time world outdoor individual gold medalist in the 100m in 2007 and then the 200m in 2011 — it represented a personal triumph as it was she who had demanded CAS judge her case after the Jamaican authorities handed her a two year suspension earlier this month on the recommendation of the IAAF anti-doping commission after initially only giving her a slap on the wrist.
Campbell-Brown — who has accrued seven Olympic medals in all and nine world outdoor championship medals — contested that the rules of the sport’s governing the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had not been respected in her case and ‘had compromised the integrity of the urine sample she gave’.
She said that there was no proof that she had violated the anti-doping laws — the three person CAS panel agreed with her.
They will not publish the reasons for their ruling for several weeks.
