Brianna McNeal has been banned from participating in the Olympics for the next five years.
According to NBC Sports, McNeal, the 2016 Olympic champion in the 100-meter hurdles, missed a drug test in January 2020, reportedly because she was on bed rest recovering from an abortion. Anti-doping officials reportedly went to her residence and called her, but no one answered. That’s when the officials labeled her absence as “tampering with part of a doping control process.” The World Athletics agency then placed her on a five-year ban.
McNeal was allowed to compete last month in the U.S. Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon, while she appealed the ruling. However, on Friday, July 2, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland dismissed her appeal and further stated in its ruling that “all competitive results” McNeal obtained between Feb. 13, 2020, and Aug. 14, 2020, “shall be disqualified with all resulting consequences including forfeiture of any medals, titles, points, prize money and prizes.”
McNeal had finished second in the 100-meter hurdles at the Olympic trials, but now the fourth-place finisher, Gabbi Cunningham, is in line to be named to the U.S. team that will compete in Tokyo. McNeal is the second sprinter to have to sit out the Toyko Olympics. On Friday, July 2, Sha’Carri Richardson accepted a one-month suspension after she tested positive for marijuana.
McNeal responded to the ruling in a lengthy Instagram post. “I sat through two hearings [sic] one held April 2021 and July 2021, and listened to white European men tell me how my experience doesn’t match their perspective,” she wrote. “They criticized me, and overly judged my decision making, completely ignored the fact that I was under physical and mental trauma after undergoing an abortion, and that I was not in the right mental capacity when making decisions. They never expressed any sympathy with my situation.”
McNeal wrote that, during the second hearing, officials also brought in a clinical psychiatrist. “I watched them try to discredit the doctor we used to testify about abortion stigma,” she continued. “I couldn’t stop thinking to myself, ‘how could these men tell me what type of experience I should have had; how could these men who would never in a million years be in my shoes tell me anything I should be going through’?”
Later in McNeal’s statement, she wrote that she is a clean athlete and has never taken any banned substances but is “being treated like one of the worst dopers out there.”
She added: “To be clear: I have been tested no less than 70 times, including the three days after this missed test (and at the Olympic Trials) and have never tested positive. I am being excommunicated from the sport as if I was shooting up drugs my entire career.”
Loss my baby brother literally a month ago, two weeks before the trials. As if this case and everything else I've been enduring isn't a lot. Some of you could never. I just seek God everyday. Yall have no idea…..I'm out!!!
— Brianna McNeal (@Bri_Rollin) July 5, 2021
