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Jade Jones insists she has never taken performance-enhancing drugs, after it was revealed that the Olympic taekwondo fighter refused to take an anti-doping test in December.
The 31-year-old, who won Olympic gold medals in London and Rio de Janeiro, was cleared of fault by the UK Anti-Doping Agency (Ukad) in a verdict issued shortly before the Games, after she presented an unspecified medical condition in mitigation.
At the Grand Palais in Paris, the No 3-ranked Jones suffered a surprise opening-round defeat by Miljana Reljikj of North Macedonia to end her hopes of winning a third Olympic title. The best-of-three bout went to a deciding round, which was drawn 1-1, but Reljikj won the contest by virtue of being the more aggressive fighter.
Afterwards a clearly emotional Jones said she has always been a clean competitor.
“No, I can confirm I’ve never taken drugs,” she said. “I’ve done hundreds of tests. Since then I’ve done I think 13 more tests, blood, and I’ve never had any [positive results].”
She added: “I’m obviously not on drugs, I just lost.”
Had she been found at fault by Ukad, Jones risked a long-term suspension from the sport. This was not the sort of missed test which can occasionally happen when an athlete fails to fill in their whereabouts online and is not home when a tester calls by. Athletes can make two whereabouts failures in 12 months before the third triggers a violation and potential ban.
Instead, when Jones was approached by a doping control officer at a Manchester hotel at 7am on 1 December last year, she refused to take the test.
Jones explained to the doping control officer that she could not offer up a urine sample because she had not eaten or drunk anything for two days in an effort to make a weigh-in that morning.
According to the case report, the doping control officer reminded Jones “approximately five times” of the potentially serious anti-doping violation she risked committing by failing to comply, which carries a ban of up to four years. But Jones signed a form indicating she couldn’t provide a sample.
“I signed a piece of paper, yeah,” she explained. “But I didn’t know what I was signing. I was fully dehydrated. I hadn’t drank and wasn’t in the right mind to sign it.”
Around an hour later, she left the hotel alone to go home before the weigh-in.
Jones did then give a sample to a different doping control officer later that evening, which was clean. But that was 12 hours later, a window in which some substances can become undetectable.
“The drugs tester’s come on dehydration day,” Jones explained. “And, people who know, when you’re losing the weight, you haven’t eaten and drank for a few days. And I said straight away, ‘Let’s go, you have to come with me [to a dehydration bath], I’ve got to lose the weight’.
“Then, basically, she didn’t know if she could come or not. So there was a lot of stress, and I was waiting. I needed to go and dehydrate and weigh in. I became stressed. I wasn’t in the right mind. And basically I thought you could miss three [tests]. So I was very lucky, they looked into it, seen I wasn’t in the wrong.”
After a drawn-out disciplinary process, the UK Anti-Doping Agency (Ukad) passed a ‘no-fault’ ruling on the basis of a report by a psychiatrist, which concluded that Jones’s “decision to refuse or failure to provide a sample occurred as a direct result of her cognitive impairment”.
The details of Jones’s medical condition have been kept confidential, but Ukad said the verdict was a result of “very exceptional circumstances”.
Jones did not speak to the media in the build-up to the Games. She released only a brief statement, saying she was “stressed and panicked” by her weigh-in when the doping control officer arrived.
Here she fronted up after a difficult day, having gone out at the first hurdle just as she did in Tokyo three years earlier.
“Right now it’s pretty hard, but I’m super proud of having the courage to try to do something that no one’s done [win three golds]. The more you win, the harder it gets, the pressure, the mental side of it, and it’s just tough.
“I came out today and I froze and didn’t have the balls that it took to fight free, let my legs go. I’m just gutted that I didn’t show what I was capable of, that me and my coach have worked so hard to show. If anything, that’s the biggest regret.”
Asked what the future holds, Jones said: “I don’t know yet, I’m not sure. I’ll just go back home, see my family, and see what happens.”
