Athlete's Olympic dream capsized by silly fib

• Published date: 29 May 2020
• Publication title: Shanghai Daily

IT makes no difference whether Mark Dry was at the fishing hole or at his parents' house on the day that all but pulverized what's left of his Olympic dreams.

What does matter is that Dry wasn't home that day, which is where he said he'd be. And that when authorities asked him where he really was, he told them he'd gone fishing when, in truth, he'd taken a trip to visit his folks.

Dry's seemingly harmless fish story has mushroomed into a stranger-than-fiction whereabouts case that has the 32-year-old Scottish hammer thrower facing a four-year doping ban that could spell the end of his career.

Some view his case as a moralistic tale about truth telling what happened to an athlete who told a lie when offering the plain facts would've done him no harm. Others see it as something more disquieting a tale of inexplicable overreach by anti-doping authorities who chose to pursue the harshest of penalties for an infraction that could've just as easily resulted in a slap on the wrist.

"I don't really quite understand what's happening," Dry said of the legal maneuverings and rule book parsing that have become a regular part of his daily life. "It's not a world I'm used to or particularly want to be a part of."

The day that ruined Dry's life: October 15, 2018.

Like most elite athletes across the globe, Dry, a 2016 Olympian, had filled out a "whereabouts form" giving authorities the details of where he planned to be on any given day so they could show up for a no-advance-notice doping test. No-notice testing is considered one of the strongest deterrents to illicit drug use in the elite-sports world. Without it, authorities would largely be limited to testing athletes at major events, where the doping-control station is an expected detour between the finish line and the locker room.

But when the doping control officer knocked on Dry's door, he wasn't home. Given Dry's status in the British anti-doping system he was part of the country's less-scrutinized "national testing pool" his no-show that day would count as the first of three strikes that would have to accrue to elevate him into the "registered testing pool." Three whereabouts failures while in the registered pool would equal a missed test, which could bring a ban of up to two years.

Whereabouts cases are nothing new in the anti-doping world. The most notable of recent vintage involved world-champion sprinter Christian Coleman of the United States. Different interpretations of the rule book led the US Anti-Doping Agency to...