The women’s 400m world champion Salwa Eid Naser will miss the rearranged Olympic Games this summer after she was handed a two-year ban over missed drug tests between March 2019 and January 2020.
Naser had been cleared of whereabouts failures by a disciplinary tribunal last October but the court of arbitration for sport upheld appeals made by World Athletics and the World Anti-Doping Agency contesting the decision.
The Cas panel found the 23-year-old Nigerian-born Bahraini guilty under article 2.4 of the IAAF anti-doping rules, which relates to “any combination of three missed tests and/or filing failures”.
A Cas statement said: “Ms Salwa Eid Naser is sanctioned with a period of ineligibility of two years, commencing on 30 June 2021 with credit given for the period of provisional suspension already served between 4 June and 14 October 2020.
“All competitive results obtained by Ms Salwa Eid Naser from 25 November 2019 through to the date of notification of the CAS award shall be disqualified, with all of the resulting consequences, including forfeiture of any medals, titles, ranking points and prize and appearance money.”
Naser swept to gold at the world championship in October 2019 in Doha, Qatar, in a time of 48.14sec. The Cas decision means that, as well as being unable to feature at the Tokyo Games in a few weeks, Naser will be unable to defend her world title in Eugene, Oregon, next year.
