Sprint sensation Asinga banned for doping

Surinamese sprinter Issam Asinga will be banned for four years and stripped of his world under-20 100 metres record after being found guilty of doping, the Athletics Integrity Unit said on Monday.

Asinga, 19, will also lose the South American outdoor 100m and 200m titles he won last year.

The US-based athlete had claimed that his positive test was due to eating Gatorade Recovery Gummies, which he said were contaminated.

However, the AIU said Asinga "did not succeed in establishing, by a balance of probability, that the Gatorade Recovery Gummies were the source of the GW1516 metabolites detected in his sample of 18 July 2023".

GW1516 is a substance that modifies how the body metabolises fat.

While it was originally developed for the treatment of conditions such as obesity and diabetes, it is no longer approved for human use and the World Anti-Doping Agency has warned athletes of its risks to health.

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The AIU said the Gatorade Recovery Gummies provided by Asinga in unsealed containers for testing "contained significantly more GW1516 on the outside than on the inside, which practically excludes any contamination by raw ingredients during the manufacturing process".

In addition, a sealed jar of the gummies taken from the same batch consumed by Asinga returned a negative result when tested by the Lausanne anti-doping laboratory.

All of Asinga's results since the date of the test, July 18, 2023, will be cancelled.

Ten days later, in his first international race, Asinga set a world under-20 100m record of 9.89sec to win the South American title in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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That time, which will now be struck from the record books, was 0.02sec faster than the previous under-20 record set by Botswana's Letsile Tebogo of 9.91sec.

It was the fastest time by a South American since Brazil's Robson da Silva ran 10.00sec in 1989.

Reporting by AFP