Anti-Doping Got It Wrong and Eventually Cleared Lizzy Banks—But the Damage Was Done
We generally assume that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is doing the right thing—catching athletes who are purposefully using banned substances to improve performance. But there’s more to the story, and earlier this week, former pro cyclist Lizzy Banks shared her story in an in-depth interview with The Telegraph. In it, she paints a very different picture of WADA and her struggle to prove her innocence after a positive test result essentially ended her career.
Nearly a year later, she’s been cleared of the doping charges—but it came at a huge cost to her mental health, finances, future earnings as a pro, and her love and faith in the sport.
Often, Olympic years are hotbeds of contention when it comes to drug testing. Because countries have a certain level of control over their own anti-doping policies despite answering to WADA, it can make for a playing field that isn’t quite level. In fact, WADA has been under fire in recent weeks for the opposite issue: 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a banned substance during a training camp but were quickly cleared as having taken a contaminated substance. All of this causes both athletes and the public to question whether WADA truly has the ability to monitor clean sports.
For Banks, her nightmare began after racing in the Giro d’Italia Donne in 2023. In July, UK Anti-Doping informed her of two Adverse Analytical Findings (a positive drug test). The first was for an asthma medication she took—formoterol—but the other was for a diuretic, chlortalidone. Neither made sense to her since, as she told The Telegraph, she was taking a legal dose of the asthma medication and had never heard of the other.
This kicked off what she calls a 10-month journey that destroyed her.
Banks’ situation was likely made worse by the fact that the month after her adverse finding, her team (EF Education-SVB-Tibco) announced that it would be folding, leaving riders scrambling to find a new ride for the 2024 season. While many of her teammates moved to the newly formed EF Education-Cannondale team, as a rider currently fighting a positive doping test, she was unlikely to get a new contract. This left Banks in the tenuous position of fighting the positive test results without a current contract, and without a team behind the scenes to support her financially or emotionally. The amount that she spent to prove her innocence is an estimated £40,000—money she won’t recoup from WADA or from a team.
Beyond that, she admits to feeling suicidally depressed. She’s still on anti-depressants, even after finally being cleared by the UKAD and WADA with a “No Fault or Negligence” ruling on her test. And she has no intention of returning to racing. She announced her official retirement this week.
And the cause? It’s unclear, but what she learned about contaminated medication during her year of research is bone-chilling, even for athletes who don’t get tested regularly. She was never able to pinpoint the medication that had the contaminated substances, and this is where she takes severe umbrage with UKAD and WADA: Her test sample was collected in May, but not tested until July—nearly 80 days later. The problem with that, she says, is that the onus on the athlete to then find the contaminated substance is made difficult by the fact that three months had passed. It’s hard to look back that far and find samples of the medications you took in that time period—most athletes will only have current medications on hand.
“The rules recommend that sample results should be returned within 20 days. Yet there are no special circumstances for athletes who find themselves searching for a contaminant they ingested three months ago instead of less than three weeks ago,” Banks told The Telegraph.
“In the end, everything I worked for has been destroyed literally because I took medications to keep me healthy,” she added. “I think the problem is if WADA acknowledges this, they risk their whole system falling apart.”
Her test results were also at such a low level that the banned substance in her system wouldn’t have been medically relevant, she says. She adds that WADA even told her that chlortalidone was a common contaminant in medication—but remains on the banned list.
She notes that she’s sharing her story not to change her own life, but to hopefully open the conversation so that other athletes who find themselves in this position may feel less alone. She worries that another athlete may not have the community that she had, and would potentially commit suicide. This is a sentiment that Joe Lindsey wrote about for Bicycling when covering a doping ban in the U.S. back in 2021: He worried that writing about athletes who were guilty until proven innocent could one day cause irreparable harm.
This isn’t the first time this season that a pro has been proven innocent after a positive test: In the U.S., longtime racer Katerina Nash tested positive, but later was able to confirm that the test result came from handling her dog’s chemo drugs—adding a huge mental burden to an already devastating moment.
French rider Gauthier Navarro served more than a year-long suspension after testing positive for EPO, but was eventually cleared and able to return to racing last month. Unlike Banks, who has left the sport disheartened, Navarro opted for a more Taylor Swift-style option, seeking his ‘revenge’ in the form of returning to racing. In his return to racing Instagram, he added, “After 2 years without a bike, almost without sport, deprived of everything by this terrible injustice. Revenge is taken in the most beautiful way!”
You Might Also Like
