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Foreign Athletes Appear Easy Targets as Scapegoats for Violating Doping Rules

You may know Blessing Okagbare, the Nigerian athlete who holds the national 100 m record and Africa's record until 2021, and her debacle with performance-enhancing drugs during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. The provider of the drugs to Okagbare, an American by name of Eric Lira, was also implicated in another athlete's case, who is designated as "athlete 2" while Okagbare was designated as athlete 1 by the FBI who investigated Eric Lira. There are no other athletes outed other than these two Nigerians whereas the court filing said there were others. That Athlete 2 happens to be Divine Oduduru. How come only Nigerians were scapegoats in Eric Lira's case? There is no single American. FBI does not do a haphazard's job, they are thorough. They must have seized
Eric's phone and have access to all the athletes he has ever treated or communicated with about selling drugs to, why was none reported to the professional associations of the athletes.

Oduduru's crime was not that he tested positive for any banned drug but he was soliciting the use of the drug and some substances were found in his possession. From an excerpt from Okagbare's interaction with this Eric guy, it is obvious she was deceived into taking the drug - notwithstanding, as an experienced athlete, she should have known better. When you read the charges against Eric Lira, it reads he is charged under a new 2020 law called Rodchenkov Act, for distributing performance-enhancement drugs. To whom was he distributing, only athlete 1 and athlete 2, both of who are Nigerian top athletes in the US, and no single American was implicated other than the distributors. It appears these weak and less connected Nigerian athletes were easy targets for the authorities to scapegoat.

It is the end of Blessing Okagbare and Divine Oduduru's careers, and their reputation is destroyed forever. They have themselves to blame but it is too easy to catch only foreign athletes and no single American.... these happen too often... The question remains, how many top athletes use performance-enhancement drugs? You see them performing like a robot during major competitions but lose form immediately after.


If you are interested in reading more about the case, here is the link to an online record of the court case against Eric Lira: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/first-olympic-anti-doping-charges-filed-manhattan-federal-court

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