American sprinter Calvin Harrison has been suspended for two years for a second doping violation and will be ineligible for the Athens Olympics, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) said on Monday.
The ruling could also cost the US its 2003 world 4x400m relay gold medal since Harrison, according to the decision, was ineligible to compete at the time.
In a similar case last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) recommended that the International Olympic Committe strip the US 4x400m relay team of its Sydney Olympics gold medal because another sprinter, Jerome Young, was ineligible following a 1999 positive doping test.
Harrison ran on US 4x400m relay teams at both the 2000 Olympic Games and 2003 world championships.
He tested positive for the banned stimulant modafinil at the 2003 US national championships, the USADA said in a statement.
Harrison's first doping offence occurred at the 1993 US junior national championships, which also involved a prohibited stimulant.
He had been named to the preliminary 4x400m relay pool for Athens after finishing fifth in the individual event at last month's Olympic trials.
Harrison's lawyer, Edward Williams, said he did not know whether his client would appeal the decision, made by a three-member panel of the American Arbitration Association (AAA)/North American Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
"He's disappointed, particularly about the fact that the arbitrators didn't essentially nullify the repercussions of the first offence, which dealt with pseudoephedrine, which is no longer on the [banned] list... It was then but is not now," Williams said in a telephone interview.
Williams also said Harrison's due process was denied in the 1993 hearing process.
The lawyer also expressed disappointment that the hearing panel did not accept the testimony of his expert witness, a pharmacologist once employed by the manufacturer of modafinil, that the drug was not a stimulant.
USADA officials said modafinil was prohibited at the time of the test because it is related to the classes of substances banned under IAAF rules.
Harrison admitted in an Oct. 2003 telephone interview that he "tested positive for modafinil at the nationals."
He said a coach in California had given him this pill.
"He [the coach] emphasized that it was not on the banned substance list and assured me that it was not an illegal substance," Harrison said
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