Issam Asinga v. World Athletics

Issam Asinga (also reported as Issamade Asinga), a Suriname sprinter and Texas A&M student, was one of the sport's most promising young talents: in April 2023 he beat reigning world champion Noah Lyles in a wind-aided 100m, and weeks later, at the 2023 South American Championships, set the U20 100m world record of 9.89 seconds. He was provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit on 9 August 2023 after an out-of-competition sample taken 18 July 2023 — both the A and B samples — tested positive for GW1516 (also known as Cardarine or Endurobol), a substance developed to build endurance and burn fat that was discontinued after animal trials linked it to cancer. The World Athletics Disciplinary Tribunal imposed a four-year ban on 6 May 2024, disqualifying all results from 18 July 2023, including his U20 world record.

Asinga's defence was that he had eaten Gatorade-branded "Recovery Gummies" the week before the positive test, received in a gift bag after being recognised by Gatorade as a top high school track and field athlete (reported variously as a Florida state-level or national honour across different sources) in a Los Angeles ceremony. He said the gummies carried an NSF "Certified for Sport" label despite being contaminated, and pointed to a batch discrepancy in the lot number on the containers he was given. His own testing of two containers from that batch found GW1516 present; the AIU's own testing, however, found that a sealed jar from the same batch tested negative for the substance at the Lausanne anti-doping laboratory. His attorney, Paul J. Greene, told the Associated Press: "We just want to save Issam's career. He just wants his life back."

Asinga appealed to CAS in June 2025. Following a hearing, the CAS Panel dismissed the appeal on 30 October 2025, holding that the athlete had failed to establish, on the balance of probabilities, that the gummies were more likely than not the source of the GW1516 metabolites, and separately failed to establish that the violation was unintentional. The four-year ban and disqualification of results were upheld in full.

Asinga pursued a separate, parallel legal avenue: a civil lawsuit against Gatorade and its parent company PepsiCo, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleging the companies had supplied a contaminated product mislabeled as NSF-certified and had knowingly withheld evidence that would have cleared him. A judge dismissed that lawsuit, finding no proof that Gatorade had intentionally caused him to ingest a banned substance.

Alongside the Knighton decision elsewhere in this library, this case reinforces a consistent theme in current CAS doping jurisprudence: an athlete asserting a contamination or supplement-based defence needs to substantiate it with real evidence — batch testing of the actual product consumed, not simply a plausible narrative and a certification label that a rival test undermines. It is also a reminder that a doping sanction and any related civil claim against a third party proceed on entirely separate legal tracks, with different parties, different burdens, and no guarantee that losing one affects the other.