Former EF rider Lizzy Banks has opened up about her battle to clear her identify after returning an opposed analytical discovering in a UK Anti-Doping check final July.
The British racer was notified by UKAD of a optimistic check for bronchial asthma remedy Formoterol in addition to a low stage of the diuretic Chlortalidone “indicative of a contamination”.
As a outcome, Banks has spent a lot of the previous 12 months trying to clear her identify, with UKAD insisting on handing her a two-year ban, she wrote in an entry on her personal website.
Banks wrote that following the 2 optimistic exams, she had “spent the final 9 months of my life investigating, researching, and writing my submissions to ascertain how the contamination occasion occurred” earlier than the case was ultimately handed to a tribunal.
She wrote that UKAD modified their place simply 5 days earlier than the tribunal, concluding that Banks was “not at any fault and had exercised a particularly excessive stage of care always with the intention to keep away from ingesting a prohibited substance.”
After months of making ready for and preventing her case, UKAD ultimately got here to the conclusion that Banks bore “no fault or negligence” for the positives and would subsequently keep away from any sanctions because of this.
“This course of has value me an enormous quantity, actually and metaphorically. My husband and I spent each penny of our financial savings and the massive psychological toll has left deep scars,” Banks wrote.
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“But one way or the other, by all of it, I knew I needed to battle. Right from the beginning, I learnt of different athletes in the same conditions with a contamination of chlortalidone, whose lives and careers have been additionally being torn aside.
“This course of pushed me proper to the sting and my worry that an athlete would transcend that edge is what drove me to try to incite important optimistic change. With my background in drugs, my luck in life to have had a superb schooling and eventually my dogged willpower, I actually believed that if I could not battle the injustices on this system, then no athlete may.”
An interview with Banks revealed by The Telegraph on Tuesday states that Banks and her husband estimated that they’ve spent over £40,000 preventing the instances, including that she’s now ending her profession on account of the ordeal.
In the interview, Banks says that she “could not threat placing her household by one thing like this ever once more” ought to she return to racing. Her retirement is official as of in the present day.
Banks estimates that 316 athletes might have examined optimistic on account of contamination in 2019, pointing the finger at WADA for ignoring the issue.
“WADA have recognized there was one thing up right here for years, and but they’ve not performed something about it,” she mentioned.
“How does WADA compensate athletes which were wrongly accused of dishonest? How do they offer them again these two years of life? Repay them for all of the misplaced earnings and authorized charges? Repair their shattered psychological well being? The quick reply is, they do not.”
Now, with no biking profession to return to on the age of 33, Banks hopes that making the UKAD’s reasoned resolution on her case publicly accessible can assist different athletes going by the identical factor in their very own related instances.
You can learn Banks’ in-depth breakdown of her story and the battle towards the instances at her web site, lizzybanks.co.uk.