American sprinter Erriyon Knighton has been banned four years after the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld appeals from World Athletics and the World Anti-Doping Agency against an earlier decision that cleared him of doping.
The ruling, issued Sept. 12, rejected Knighton’s defense that his positive test for epitrenbolone — a metabolite of the anabolic steroid trenbolone — came from eating contaminated oxtail. CAS judges found no scientific evidence to support the claim that imported meat could have produced the levels detected in his sample.
Knighton, 21, was originally charged by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in May 2024 but an American arbitration panel ruled in June that he bore no fault. That cleared him to compete until World Athletics and WADA filed appeals. CAS heard the case in June 2025 and overturned the earlier ruling, siding with the sport’s governing bodies.
“The evidence did not demonstrate a plausible meat contamination scenario,” the panel wrote, echoing arguments by World Athletics and WADA that such an explanation was “statistically impossible.”
The sanction runs until September 2028, with credit given for the two months Knighton spent under provisional suspension between April and June 2024. CAS partially granted requests to disqualify results, stripping only his performances from March 26 to April 12, 2024.
Knighton, a rising star in U.S. sprinting and once seen as a successor to Usain Bolt in the 200 meters, will now miss the Tokyo 2025 World Championships and the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.
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