A Texas physiotherapist was sentenced Wednesday to three months in prison after pleading guilty to providing performance-enhancing drugs to athletes participating in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, including Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare, US authorities said.
Eric Lira, who describes himself as a “kinesiologist and naturopath”, was last year the first indicted under the 2020 Rodchenkov law, which allows the United States to prosecute all people, regardless of their nationality, involved in an international doping system.
“Eric Lira was sentenced to three months in prison (…) for his role in supplying banned performance-enhancing products to Olympic athletes before the 2020 Summer Olympics held in Tokyo in 2021,” announced in a communicated the office of prosecutor Damian Williams in New York. “The sentence handed down today sends a clear message: violation of the Rodchenkov anti-doping law entails serious consequences up to and including incarceration,” the prosecutor said in the statement.
“This message is particularly important this year, as the Summer Olympics in Paris approach,” he stressed. The law is named after Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower behind revelations about organized doping in Russia in the early 2010s. During the trial, Eric Lira admitted to providing performance-enhancing drugs to Blessing Okagbare during the period preceding the Tokyo Olympic Games, postponed by a year due to the pandemic.
The Nigerian, among the outsiders in the 100m at the Tokyo Olympics, was excluded just before the semi-finals for doping with growth hormone. She was also singled out for a positive EPO test, before being suspended for 10 years for “multiple uses of prohibited products” and “refusal to cooperate” with the investigation. The maximum penalty for violating the Rodchenkov anti-doping law is 10 years’ imprisonment.