Olympic champion gymnast Oleg Verniaiev is set to miss the Tokyo Games because he has been banned for four years following a failed drug test.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainian gymnast tested positive for the banned substance meldonium in August 2020 and was banned after a ruling by the Gymnastics Ethics Foundation, which hears disciplinary cases in the sport.<\/p>\n
The ban is backdated to run from November 2020 and could also rule him out of the 2024 Paris Olympics. Verniaiev was also ordered to pay nearly 5,600 euros ($8,858) in costs, the GEF said in its statement Tuesday.<\/p>\n
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Verniaiev denies wrongdoing and said he will appeal the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.<\/p>\n
"The main question is how a banned substance got into my body?" he wrote in an Instagram post Tuesday. "Why did it happen at a time when there were no serious international competitions and there was only light training taking place?"<\/p>\n
Verniaiev won gold on the parallel bars at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 and was the silver medallist in the all-around, in a dramatic, close loss to Japan's Kohei Uchimura. <\/p>\n
Since then, his competitive appearances have been limited by injuries and the provisional suspension imposed last year following his failed test, though he won all-around bronze at the last world championships in 2019.<\/p>\n
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A positive test for meldonium led to tennis star Maria Sharapova serving a 15-month ban. Sharapova said she did not know it had been banned shortly before her positive test.<\/p>\n
Meldonium is a heart medication developed in the then-Soviet Union and was banned in sports from 2016.<\/p>\n
It was also the substance which caused Russian curler Alexander Krushelnitsky to be stripped of a bronze medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Two Russian rowers were removed from their country's Olympic squad last week after positive tests for meldonium.<\/p>\n
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