Florida: Justin Gatlin, the world 100 metres champion, is at the centre of a new doping scandal after members of his team offered to illicitly supply performance-enhancing drugs.
Gatlin and his entourage are now being investigated by sports and doping authorities after a Daily Telegraph investigation uncovered how members of his team offered to provide prescriptions in a false name and smuggle the substances to the United States.
Undercover reporters visited Gatlin’s Florida training camp where his coach and an athletics agent offered to supply and administer testosterone and human growth hormone for an actor training for a film. The products were to be provided via a doctor in Austria. The total fee for the project was to be $250,000 (Dh918,000).
The coach, the former Olympic gold medallist Dennis Mitchell, and the agent, Robert Wagner, were also secretly recorded claiming that the use of banned substances in athletics was still widespread as they described how positive doping tests could be avoided.
In one meeting, the agent claimed that Gatlin had himself been taking performance enhancing drugs - which the sprinter has strenuously denied.
Gatlin’s legal representatives have announced that he had sacked his coach and revealed more than five years’ worth of official drugs tests to show “he has never tested positive for any banned substance”.
The revelations threaten to reignite the scandal of drugs in sport just three years after Russia was said to have systematically doped its athletes. Gatlin himself has twice been banned for doping, in 2001 and 2006.
The Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), which was set up by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in the summer, and the US Anti-Doping Agency, said they had opened an investigation into the sprinter, the agent and the coach after being made aware of the Telegraph investigation.
Wagner suggested that both testosterone and human growth hormone might be useful to ensure that the actor got into shape quickly, and that the prescription for the products could be acquired in his name and via a doctor who already supplied the products to him personally. “I will have to give my name and get this, and get this through my prescription, right?” said Wagner. He said using drugs was a “daily situation” and his “field of expertise”. He said: “I cannot tell you openly in front of five people that this is what we’re always doing left and right. This is what track and field is about.”
When the reporter asked how recently the agent had been involved with the banned substance, he added: “Three months ago. Before the season ended. Right now. Obviously, and as soon as the season starts.”
As if to illustrate his point, he continued by naming sports stars who were using drugs, including Gatlin. “You think Justin is not doing this? Do you think Dennis [Mitchell] wasn’t doing this? Everybody does it,” he alleged.
Gatlin’s lawyers said that Wagner had “reasons to misinterpret his experience with prohibited substances” and denied that the athlete had used any banned substances since his return to the sport.
