Lizzie Armitstead did not challenge a missed drug test from 2015 until she faced an 11th-hour ban from the Olympics for missing three controls, UK’s anti‑doping federation has said.
Drug testers from UK Anti-Doping (Ukad) could not find the world road race champion on three occasions during the past year, resulting in an automatic suspension from the sport pending an independent review into whether she had violated doping rules.
The first missed “whereabouts” test came on 20 August last year, with the second on 5 October 2015 and the third on 9 June this year. It was only after Ukad brought its charge against the 27-year-old on 11 July this year that she decided to challenge the first missed test by bringing a case to the court of arbitration for sport, which overturned the decision on Monday.
She said the August violation occurred after she had her phone on silent at her team hotel during the UCI Women’s Road World Cup in Sweden, but that testers should easily have been able to find her when they arrived at the location and simply did not look for her properly.
Armitstead, who won silver in the London Olympics in 2012, accepts responsibility for missing the October and July tests. She blames a “filing failure caused by an administrative oversight” for the former, her spokeswoman said, with the second due to “an emergency change of plans due to a serious illness within her family”.
In a statement Armitstead told the Daily Mail: “I did think about it [challenging the first ‘failure’]. But the reason I didn’t was because it was my first strike and it was very close to the world championships, so I was travelling to America. I also didn’t have the legal advice. It felt very much them against me. I was very naive. I went ahead to the World Championships and I didn’t want the distraction.” She admitted the prospect of being banned had left her in turmoil.
“I felt like I was standing on a cliff and I was going to fall off the edge,” she said. “It was more than just missing the Olympics in Rio. It was everything else. It was what was going on with my family. I was more concerned about my reputation and people’s understanding of it. I could have been banned. That’s what I was most scared about. All the hard work being for nothing. It was basically my livelihood and my sport being taken away from me. It was everything. A black line.” On Tuesday the Ukad chief executive, Nicole Sapstead, said: “Ms Armitstead chose not to challenge the first and second whereabouts failures at the time they were asserted against her. At the Cas hearing, Ms Armitstead raised a defence in relation to the first whereabouts failure, which was accepted by the panel. We are awaiting the reasoned decision from the Cas panel as to why the first whereabouts failure was not upheld.”
Armitstead, who is from Otley in Yorkshire, says she did not cheat and that Ukad did not follow the proper procedure. “I was tested in competition the day after this test, reinforcing my position that I do not cheat and had no intention of not being tested,” she said in a statement on Tuesday. Her suspension was lifted on 21 July following her successful appeal to Cas.
Nicole Cooke, who won gold in Beijing in the women’s road race, appeared to show little sympathy for Armitstead. In a blog post Cooke said she only missed one test in 14 years of competition, because her car broke down. “I learnt from it, as others do,” she said, citing the sprinter Mark Cavendish and Tour de France winner Chris Froome as other cyclists who took full responsibility for missing a test each. Cooke said she previously considered Ukad’s testing scheme to be “too permissive a regime, allowing the drug cheats too much latitude”. She said she was assured that any athlete who made too many last-minute changes to their whereabouts would draw more targeted testing. She said sports people simply wanted a level playing field. “Fair rules to be applied fairly, at all times, to all athletes.”
Other athletes questioned how this could have happened, with the former British Olympic rowing gold medallist Zac Purchase posting on Twitter: “Given huge amount of resources @ their disposal, having multiple missed tests/filing failure is a monumental cockup! Imagine what we would be saying if she was Russian … #NotWorthIt #KeepSportClean.”
The Tour de France winner Chris Froome, who is aiming for gold in the road race on Saturday and in the time trial, would not comment in detail on Armitstead’s case. “In Lizzie’s case, to be honest with you I got in late last night. I heard about it, but I haven’t followed the details. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to comment on it,” he said. “We’re here at the Games, something like what we’re about to do now, especially me with the road race and the time-trial, I’m completely focused on that now”. Froome agreed it “must be hard” for Armitstead. He said he hadn’t had any more missed tests since he admitted having missed two in his career last year.
“In a case like Lizzie’s the rules are there and the authorities have all the information to make the right decisions. Everyone wants to see a clean Games and we hope the authorities have made the right decision,” he said. “I’ve missed two I think in my whole career. Every case is different and I don’t want to comment on the circumstances of Lizzie.”
Rochelle Gilmore, an Australian former professional who now manages the women’s team Wiggle High 5, said: “In the year leading up to the Olympics I’d have thought Lizzie would have had it as a higher priority and had people looking out for it for her when she makes a move. Personally I think the system is a little bit too much stress for an athlete. I wish we could opt to have a chip that locates your whereabouts, whether in a bracelet or necklace or in your phone. It’s a lot of responsibility for an athlete who is really under a lot of pressure to remember those things in the heat of the moment.”
The Canadian three-time former Olympian cross-country mountain biker Geoff Kabush added: “1st test understandable but I’d be hyper aware about missing 2nd. If I missed 2nd there is no chance I’d miss 3rd??? So many questions. How is World Champ suspended for 3 weeks and no one knows? Why did British Cycling fund appeal?”
When British Cycling executives heard that Armitstead, one of its top medal hopes for Rio, may be banned from the Games, it commissioned independent legal advice to assess its position.
If an athlete fails three in the space of 12 months they face up to a two-year suspension. Christine Ohuruogu, the 400m runner, served a year-long ban a decade ago after missing three tests. With British Cycling coaches privately accepting that the squad is unlikely to win as many medals as four years ago, Armitstead is a crucial team member, having won not only the world championship in September but also key races like the Aviva Women’s Tour, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and the Tour of Flanders.
“We paid for legal advice on our own position because there were a number of considerations as she was going through the Olympic selection process and was a podium athlete,” said a British Cycling spokesman. “That legal advice was shared with Lizzie and her team. Lizzie herself funded the actual appeal to Cas”
It costs a minimum of 1,000 Swiss francs [£781] for an appeal to be registered with Cas, with costs rising up as high as 50,000 CHF [£39,091] in complicated cases.
The spokesman admitted that British Cycling had made contingency plans for the road race without Armitstead, but declined to say who would have been de facto leader in the world champion’s absence. The Guardian understands that Dani King, who won gold in the velodrome in London 2012 but got dropped from the British Cycling programme after a crash, would have been brought in as first reserve.
Despite Armitstead’s protestations that Ukad drug testers had not followed their own rules properly, the chief executive Sapstead issued a robust defence of the programme, pointing out that extensive support was available to athletes to play by the rules.
“UK Anti-Doping recognises that athletes can make mistakes and that plans can change at short notice. We therefore provide a huge amount of support to athletes throughout their time on the Whereabouts programme to ensure the information they provide is accurate and submitted in a timely manner. This includes providing athletes with a dedicated member of staff to provide ongoing guidance and training on their Whereabouts responsibilities. We also offer athletes a variety of whereabouts tools, including a dedicated website and a free mobile app, so they can easily update their whereabouts wherever they are in the world. Athletes can even text or email changes to us in an emergency. On top of this, Ukad provides additional, escalating support to athletes who incur whereabouts failures which is tailored to their specific needs,” she said.
“It is important to note that we will not publicly disclose provisional suspensions, or disclose details of cases, until an anti-doping rule violation has deemed to have been committed, at which point information will be published on our website. This is to ensure that the rights and privacy of everyone involved are respected and to ensure the case is not unnecessarily prejudiced.”
This is the third serious leak to hit British Cycling in recent months, following the controversial departure of the former head coach, Shane Sutton, who was embroiled in a sexism row. In April, someone told the Daily Mail that Simon Yates, a professional rider who is also on British Cycling’s podium programme, was facing a ban for violating anti-doping rules. Then last month the roster for the Olympic squad was leaked to the same newspaper, several days before the team was due to be unveiled.
