Egypt international soccer player Hossam Ghaly and a female marathon runner from the US were falsely suspected of doping because of a Malaysian laboratory’s mistakes, a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling said.
Ghaly was among three Middle East-based players who served suspensions because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)-accredited lab in Penang wrongly reported positive tests for the steroid nandrolone, the ruling said.
The US runner, who was not identified in the document, avoided a ban because athletics’ world governing body and US anti-doping officials did not trust her test results. The lab failed to consider the possible effects of a birth-control pill on her urine sample, the CAS report revealed.
The court panel of three lawyers on Wednesday dismissed the Malaysian testing center’s appeal against being stripped of its accreditation by WADA.
The lab’s mistakes demonstrated a “serious lack of competence,” the ruling said. “Its errors had the propensity to cause harm, but for the initiatives of the athletes and the investigations of other laboratories, the errors would not have been unmasked and the athletes’ careers interrupted, if not terminated.”
Ghaly, a former player with Tottenham Hotspur and Feyenoord, was with Saudi Arabian club Al-Nassr in February last year when the lab reported a positive test for nandrolone. He challenged the analysis, but served a one-month ban before his innocence was proved by a WADA lab in Cologne, Germany.
The German lab also helped clear the unnamed US runner of a false positive from a December 2009 sample collected in Singapore.
“Both the IAAF and the USADA raised questions about the center’s ‘A’ sample certificate of analysis,” the report said, adding that Penang staff later “reviewed the case and checked for pregnancy and the use of birth-control pills.”
Two soccer players in the United Arab Emirates, Samir Ibrahim Ali Hassan and Hassan Tir, served eight-month bans last year before the Cologne lab cleared their names.
In a separate CAS verdict last year, Hassan was awarded 10,000 Swiss francs (US$11,900) in legal costs from the United Arab Emirates anti-doping authority, the report said.
The Malaysian lab was the first of more than 35 labs in WADA’s worldwide network to be barred from conducting tests. It was suspended for three months in 2009 after failing to detect an anabolic steroid.
Since Penang was sanctioned in June last year, WADA has also disciplined labs in Tunisia and Turkey for failing to meet international standards.
WADA relied on its labs “to deliver faultless assessments” and maintain integrity in the fight against doping, the CAS panel said.
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