The 31 years old Ethiopian marathon runner, Getaye Fisseha Gelaw has been banned for six years for taking ban substance erythropoietin (EPO); Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) has announced.
AIU did not buy into Getaye colourful submittion.
The Ethiopian distance runner argued that following a September 2021 injury, colleagues had advised him to use painkillers which he later found to contain (EPO).
‘The Athlete confirmed that he had not injected himself on those occasions, but that his ‘colleagues’ had injected him directly into his injured knee and that he did not know when or from where the substance he was injected with had been purchased’.
‘Following a request for additional information by the AIU on 17 March 2022, including that the Athlete confirm the identities of those individuals that had advised him to take painkillers and of those who had injected him, the Athlete responded on 24 March 2022 explaining that he had been in Turkey from August 2021 until the beginning of October 2021 and that this is where he had been injured during training and been injected. He explained that athletes were present, but that he didn’t ‘have a long time relationship with [the] athletes’.
‘The Athlete also stated that those who had injected him were not athletes, but persons closely associated with them, and that he did not ‘know them in detail’.’
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