Olympic gold medalist Gil Roberts can kiss his suspension goodbye after the Court of Arbitration for Sport on Thursday sided with Roberts' defense that frequent and passionate kissing with his girlfriend resulted in a positive drug test. Roberts, who tested positive for probenecid, a masking agent, in March, was suspended in May when his B sample also came up positive.
According to the New York Times, An arbitrator overturned the suspension in July 2017 after finding that Roberts' defense did, in fact, hold water. The World Anti-Doping Agency appealed the removal of the suspension, but the Court of Arbitration found that it is more likely than not "that the presence of probenecid in the athlete's system resulted from kissing his girlfriend."
Roberts is a 400-meter sprinter, and he is part of the USA 4x400 relay team that won a gold medal at Rio's Summer Games in 2016.
"There could have been tongue kissing, but it was more that she kissed me so soon after taking the medicine," Roberts said in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday.
Roberts was facing up to a four-year ban, which would have made him ineligible for the Olympics being held in Tokyo in 2020.
Roberts' girlfriend, Alex Salazar, said that she was sick when Roberts contracted the traces from her, which she had kept hidden from him at the time. Her stepfather testified as well, saying that he had participated in the buying of Moxylong, an antibiotic that has probenecid as a trace element.
"We had passport stamps, receipts and all of the dates lined up perfectly," Salazar said of the timeline between vacationing to India, where the Moxylong was purchased, and her return home to Los Angeles.
This is, of course, the type of preparation it would take to keep a suspension overturned. According to The New York Times, Roberts also had expert witness Dr. Pascal Kintz on his side. Kintz gave testimony on a similar case in 2009 when tennis player Richard Gasquet had cocaine in his system after kissing a woman in a nightclub.
