French 100m champion Mouhamadou Fall tested positive for octodrine – Libération

2023-09-20 13:17:02

The four-time French straight line champion, acquitted in July in another procedure, tested positive for a stimulant during the French Championships in Albi last July.

However, he was warned. Barely out of the woods this summer, Mouhamadou Fall finds himself once again in the sights of anti-doping. The Frenchman, 31, tested positive for octodrine on July 28 during the French Elite Athletics Championships, the day of his 100m coronation, specifies the athlete, confirming information from L’Equipe. “We are going to have the B sample checked,” said the four-time French straight-line champion.

The sprinter, pillar of the 4×100 m tricolor relay, sixth at the World Championships in Budapest in August – whose result could be canceled after this control – had barely emerged from another procedure with anti-doping. The French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD) wanted to sanction him for three breaches of his anti-doping whereabouts obligations in 2022, including the third just before the World Championships in Eugene in the United States, in August 2022.

Fall was acquitted in July 2023, the sanctions commission having deemed the third breach inadmissible. “The Sanctions Commission, however, decided not to uphold this third breach, arguing that it was a simple error in handling the software and an extremis modification of this information,” the AFLD specified at the time.

Suspicions

The French gendarme had, however, announced his intention to initiate an appeal before the Council of State in this procedure. An action reinforced by the fact that the athlete had in the meantime been guilty of two new “no shows” since the start of 2023, enough to fuel suspicions surrounding his case.

With this abnormal analytical result (AAR), Mouhamadou Fall risks two years of suspension, octodrine being a “specified” substance belonging to the class of stimulants, classified by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in category S6 of stimulants prohibited in competition. It can be found in many medications, for example those intended to treat nasal congestion, or in food supplements.

A “specified” substance, according to the code of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), also allows athletes to plead the fact that the product could have penetrated “into the body […] inadvertently” and allows “to give the court more flexibility when rendering a sanction decision”. If the analysis of the B sample confirms the presence of octodrine, a disciplinary procedure targeting the sprinter should then be opened by the AFLD. For Fall, the Paris 2024 Games have never seemed so far away.