By Andrew Warshaw
August 7 – A Jamaican international and one of his country’s team officials have been suspended for 30 days by FIFA after they failed drugs tests following a 2014 World Cup qualifier against Honduras on June 11.
The Jamaican Football federation announced last month that an unidentified player tested positive for a banned substance, with FIFA saying the player declined to have his backup sample analysed.
FIFA has now imposed a temporary ban but won’t identify the player or official until the case is proven. Both have until August 12 to request a full disciplinary hearing and a further week to submit supporting documentary evidence.
Jamaica lost 2-0 in Honduras and is bottom of its CONCACAF group that is led by the United States. The top three qualify directly to play in Brazil. With four games left to play in qualifying the Jamaicans have appointed a new head coach, German Winfried Schafer.
The suspensions come just days after FIFA chief medical officer Prof. Jiří Dvořák announced that there was “no systematic doping culture in football”. “We do more than 30,000 sampling procedures every year and we have between 70 to 90 positive cases, most of them for marijuana and cocaine and we have also anabolic steroids, but these are individual cases,” he said.
The Jamaica case nevertheless focuses more bad publicity on the Caribbean nation in the wake of a major doping scandal involving Jamaican athletes ahead of the upcoming world track and field championships in Moscow.
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