Wheelchair Basketball Player Simon Gibbs In Two Year Ban

British wheelchair basketball player Simon Gibbs has lost his appeal against a two-year ban for testing positive for the designer drug mephedrone in 2010.

Gibbs will now miss next year’s Paralympics in London.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Gibbs could not prove a friend had spiked his drink with the banned stimulant in February 2010.

The World Anti-Doping Code allows reduced penalties only when athletes prove how they ingested it.

Gibbs was seen as one of the country’s finest prospects and named male newcomer of the year at the Wheelchair Sports Awards in 2009.

He is ineligible for the Paralympics because of an International Olympic Committee rule which bars athletes who receive a doping ban of at least six months.

CAS rejected the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation’s appeal that the ban imposed by Britain’s anti-doping authority was too harsh. A British appeal panel had upheld the sanction but suggested “a few months” was appropriate.

In his ruling, CAS arbitrator Michael Beloff said the World Anti-Doping Code allowed reduced penalties for certain drugs – “specified substances” which can sometimes be used inadvertently – only when athletes proved how they ingested it.

“To permit an athlete to establish how a substance came to be present in his body by little more than a denial that he took it would undermine the objectives of the code and rules,” wrote Beloff.

Beloff said that Gibbs should not be stigmatised as a doper and that mephedrone – widely known as ‘meow meow’ – was “hitherto unrecorded” as a doping product, although as a stimulant with similar properties to amphetamines it was prohibited in sport.

Gibbs tested positive at a competition weeks after being selected for a national team training camp to prepare for the 2010 world championships.

The court heard that Gibbs “consumed a significant quantity of alcohol and repeatedly left his drinks unattended” on an evening spent in several pubs.

A friend of Gibbs gave evidence to the initial British hearing that he spiked a drink but the panel “did not find [his] evidence to be reliable and credible”.

At the CAS appeal heard in London, Gibbs’ legal team asked the sports court to consider his reputation as a role model, his Olympic ambitions and the fact mephedrone was a legal recreational drug at the time. It has since been criminalised by the British government.