Paris (AFP)
South African Luvo Manyonga, reigning Olympic vice-champion in the long jump, was suspended for four years for failing to meet his anti-doping whereabouts obligations, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) announced on Friday.
Manyonga, 30, had been temporarily suspended since January.
This is the second anti-doping conviction for the athlete, who is closed to the Olympic Games in Tokyo (July 23 - August 8) but also in Paris in 2024.
Last chance for him, Luvo Manyonga can still appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), but his presence in Tokyo seems very hypothetical: he has not competed since his 4th place at the Worlds in Doha (Qatar) in September 2019.
Olympic vice-champion in the long jump in 2016 in Rio, Manyonga was also crowned world champion in the discipline in 2017 in London and vice-world indoor champion in 2018 in Birmingham.
He has a personal best of 8.65m which is also the African record.
He had already been suspended for 18 months for a positive methamphetamine control in 2012 and thus saw his penalty increased (the four years began retroactively on December 23, 2020).
Manyonga, who grew up in poverty in Mbekweni township near Cape Town, admitted to being addicted to "tik", a methamphetamine derivative at the time.
The IAU accuses him of having missed a doping control on November 26, 2019 and of having been too imprecise in his whereabouts twice in 2020.
Very high-level athletes are subject to scrupulous location obligations (address, training courses, training, competitions), and must also provide each day a time slot and a place in order to be able to be tested unexpectedly.
Three breaches of these obligations (a missed test, the "no show", or imprecise information) in less than one year are punishable by an anti-doping sanction.
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