Doping & Drugs ·
The CAS Ruling That Annulled Chernova’s World Title
The court annulled Tatyana Chernova’s results from August 2011 through July 2013 on biological-passport evidence, including a world gold and an Olympic bronze. She contested the case; an appeal was pending in April 2017.
Tatyana Chernova’s 2011 world heptathlon title and 2012 Olympic bronze fell within a period of results the Court of Arbitration for Sport annulled on 29 November 2016. The court found that the Russian athlete had committed an anti-doping rule violation after analysis of her Athlete Biological Passport showed evidence of blood doping. It disqualified all her results from 15 August 2011 through 22 July 2013—not just the two championship performances.
The order required Chernova to forfeit titles, awards, medals, points, and prize and appearance money obtained during that period. It also imposed three years and eight months of ineligibility, beginning on 5 February 2016, with credit for the suspension she had served from 22 July 2013 to 21 July 2015. The first-instance ruling was open to appeal; an International Olympic Committee decision dated 19 April 2017 said an appeal was pending.
The passport case rested on blood values collected over time. Collection of Chernova’s samples began in 2009, while the passport analysis was conducted in 2015. In August of that year, an expert panel concluded that it was “highly likely that a prohibited substance or prohibited method has been used” and unlikely that the passport resulted from another cause.
Chernova contested the case. Her former representative challenged the integrity and reliability of three samples; a response by a scientist from the WADA-accredited Swiss Laboratory for Doping Analyses rejected those objections. In her formal answer, Chernova denied that an anti-doping violation had occurred during 2011–2015 and challenged CAS’s jurisdiction and the fairness of the proceedings. Alternatively, she argued that she had served the entire period of ineligibility and that there were no grounds to disqualify further results. The court nevertheless ordered the results annulled.
The arbitrator acknowledged that disqualification, with the forfeiture of results and earnings, was a severe measure. But he wrote that declining to disqualify results achieved through a prohibited substance or method could not be fair to other competitors. The purpose, he said, was to “correct any unfair advantage and remove any tainted performances from the record.”