Sports

Texas Therapist pleads guilty to supplying drugs to Olympic athletes including Okagbare

A naturopathic therapist, Eric Lira, from El Paso, Texas, has pleaded guilty to supplying performance-enhancing drugs to Olympic athletes, including Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare, who was banned from the sport for 10 years.

Lira is the first person to be convicted under the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, a US law introduced in 2020 that enables authorities to prosecute individuals involved in international doping fraud conspiracies.

Lira was found to have supplied Okagbare with banned substances before the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Okagbare was expelled from the games just before the women’s 100m semi-finals after testing positive for human growth hormone in an out-of-competition test in Slovakia.

US Attorney Damian Williams called Lira’s conviction a “watershed moment for international sport” and warned that “such craven efforts to undermine the integrity of sport subverts the purpose of the Olympic games: to showcase athletic excellence through a level playing field.
Lira’s efforts to pervert that goal will not go unpunished.” Lira faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, with his sentence to be determined by a judge at a later date.

The United States Anti-Doping Agency welcomed Lira’s conviction, highlighting that it was only possible due to the recently enacted law.

Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the agency, said, “Without this law, Lira, who held himself out as a doctor to athletes, likely would have escaped consequence for his distribution of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs and his conspiracy to defraud the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games because he did not fall under any sport anti-doping rules.”
1 year ago
Adeyinka Arutu

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