He has admitted supplying performance-enhancing drugs to Nigeria’s Blessing Okagbare, who was suspended for 11 years by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU).
Eric Lira, therapist based in Texas (USA), who introduces himself as a doctor “kinesiologist and naturopath”, pleaded guilty on Monday (May 8) to supplying doping products to athletes during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, including the heavily suspended Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare. He is the first charged, under the Rodchenkov law, passed in December 2020, which allows the United States to prosecute all people, regardless of their nationality, involved in an international doping system.
“Lira provided banned substances intended to enhance the performance of athletes, who wanted to gain an advantage through corruption. Such efforts to undermine the integrity of sport run counter to the purpose of the Olympics, which is to put showcase athletic excellence through a level playing field. His efforts to pervert that goal will not go unpunished.”said District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams. The therapist admitted supplying doping products to Blessing Okagbare, who had been excluded from competition just before the semi-finals of the women’s 100m, for doping with growth hormone. In October of the same year, the 34-year-old athlete had been pinned down again for testing positive for EPO earlier in the season. The sprinter has since been suspended for eleven years by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU).
A law criticized by the World Anti-Doping Agency
Without the Rodchenkov law, named after the former director of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, at the origin of the revelations on organized doping in Russia between 2011 and 2015, and a refugee in the United States, “Whoever presented himself as a doctor for the athletes, would probably have escaped the consequences of his distribution of doping products and his plot to defraud the Tokyo Olympics”, welcomed Travis Tygart, head of the American Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). The law had been criticized by many international actors, including the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), fearing that it would encourage other countries to create their own extraterritorial jurisdiction for political reasons. Eric Lira’s sentence will be determined by a judge at a later date.
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