ATHLETICS: Irish athlete Gareth Turnbull has expressed "total anger and disappointment" at the Irish Sports Council's anti-doping programme after his drugs case was dropped yesterday. Over a year after the Sports Council discovered marginally high levels of testosterone in his test sample Turnbull finally got proof of his point - that he was innocent all along.
Turnbull was notified of the decision at his Belfast home yesterday morning with a 70-page document that effectively concluded his raised testosterone level was brought about naturally. Clearing his name involved a costly four-month battle and Turnbull intends to seek compensation, while exposing what he believes are serious flaws in the Sports Council's anti-doping programme.
"My first reaction was total anger and disappointment," he says. "I'm not relieved, because that would suggest I'd done something wrong. I'm angry most of all because it's a case of "I told you so". For the four months since this was made public to today there were numerous occasions when the Sports Council should have let this go, for my sake, and yet they refused.
"As far back as October of last year the IAAF wanted to sign off on the case, happy that there was no need to pursue it, and yet the Sports Council did exactly that for another eight months. I'm not too concerned about getting into the nitty-gritty of what all this has done to me. I'm more concerned about the questions this raises about the Sports Council's anti-doping. They just didn't follow their own rulebook here. The fact is we're given a rulebook to follow, codes of conduct and that, which is written by them, and yet they didn't follow any of those rules when it came to conducting the investigation on their side."
The 1,500-metre runner submitted to a doping test at his Loughborough base in England in September of last year, yet it was only on June 12th that he was notified of the adverse findings. He re-mortgaged his house in Loughborough in England to help finance his legal defence and feels particularly let down by both the Sports Council and the Athletics Association of Ireland in the months since.
"The main mechanism for pursuing this test is the IRMS test, which differentiates between natural testosterone and that which has been consumed, all three of which came back negative for me. And again it was still pursued. Then the fact that I was given 48 hours to present my case, or else I'd be provisionally banned, whereas they had nine months to prepare their case, is the added absurdity of it."
The Sports Council refused to comment on the case, stating a 14-day appeal window was in place and "the matter is therefore sub-judice."
At 27, Turnbull intends to resume his career, although his solicitor Andrew Coonan presented further implications from the case. "From a procedural point of view, I felt there were some curious anomalies in the case," says Coonan, "especially that came to light on close examination, and these went to the core of the prosecution. I feel there were aspects that might not have necessarily been uncovered had we not gone into such fine detail.
"So having been put through hell, and quite literally hell, I can understand why Gareth is so angry. And I think it does have huge implications. This is one of those cases that show the other side of the anti-doping problem, and if you end up on the wrong side of the law through no fault of your own, you really have a hell of a battle to get out of it."
