Sprinting's latest doping scandal is bad timing in a sport that can't afford more controversy

The news that Gerald Phiri, the retired Olympic sprinter and current head track coach at the Montverde Academy in Florida, had been provisionally suspended by World Athletics' Athletics Integrity Unit following a doping investigation seemed to come out of nowhere.

It hit the Internet on a slow sports news Tuesday, early in the week leading up to the World Indoor Championships, but still deep in track and field's preseason. Many of the sport's biggest stars skipped indoor meets this winter. Most won't start their outdoor campaigns until deeper into the spring.

As for the allegations – AIU maintains that Phiri has possessed a pair of prohibited substances, Cardarine and meldonium, at various points in recent years, while three of his teenage athletes tested positive for Cardarine in 2023 and 2024. They also claim that Phiri provided "false and inaccurate information" to investigators.

Two years ago, Assinga looked like the future. He won a national high school title indoors, and early in the outdoor season he outran Noah Lyles – yes, that Noah Lyles – over 100 metres. But that positive test in late summer turned the sport's latest feel-good story into the biggest doping scandal of the year.

The screening, conducted in July of 2023, revealed the presence of GW1516 Sulfoxide, a banned drug also known as Cardarine, but also raised questions about how the substance wound up in the teenager's system. Tuesday's revelation fills in some blanks but doesn't quite provide answers.

But before we can discuss any of those developments, we're stuck dealing with this one.

Track and field, after all, is not the NFL, where it's understood that players will take Toradol shots to numb pain before games, and where we just don't ask how players get bigger and faster and stronger and leaner every year.

In track and field, failed drug screenings are treated as systemic problems, symptoms of a culture that prizes results over fairness. As far as mainstream sports fans are concerned, one athlete's positive test makes every athlete a suspect.

So the news about Phiri isn't just a case of a coach getting rapped for obstructing an anti-doping investigation. It's one more drug scandal for a sport that can't afford more PED controversy.

In one sense, the timing of this news is fortunate for the track and field business. The outdoor World Championships are still nearly six months away, and most big-name sprinters are still at least six weeks away from opening their seasons. But the callback to the doping drama that short-circuited the career of a promising teenager is particularly unwelcome this spring.

Last Sunday, 17-year-old Australian sprint sensation Gout Gout ran 20.05 seconds in the 200 metres, then followed up that run with a wind-aided 19.98.

The previous day Maurice Gleaton Jr., a two-sport star from Georgia, ran a wind-aided 10.01 to win the 100 metres at a high school meet in Florida.

A week before that Brayden Williams, with the help of a slightly-stronger-than-legal tailwind, ran 9.99 at a high school competition in his native Texas

Point is, those epic early season sprints have propelled those athletes out of the track world's bubble and into the consciousness of everyday sports fans on social media. Their feats have both hardcore fans and the casuals who drop in for the Olympics feeling good about the sport's next generation of stars.