Goncalo Oliveira, a Venezuelan tennis pro, tested positive for methamphetamine in November 2024 while competing at a tournament in Mexico. With both samples yielding the same result, he had to explain himself. The explanation: he kissed someone who had taken the drug. This didn't cut it with officials, and he was suspended for four years last week by the International Tennis Integrity Agency.
This is not the first time an athlete has said a positive drug test happened because of kissing. French Olympic fencer Ysaora Thibus was cleared in July by the Court of Arbitration of a doping allegation after judges accepted she was contaminated with the anabolic substance Ostarine in 2024 by kissing her American partner over a period of nine days. She was later cleared by an International Fencing Federation tribunal weeks before the Paris Olympics, which let her compete there. In 2009, Richard Gasquet escaped a lengthy doping ban when the International Tennis Federation's tribunal panel ruled that he inadvertently took cocaine by kissing a woman in a nightclub.
The tribunal decided he "couldn't prove the drug's presence was unintentional," reports the Associated Press. The New York Times has more on the circumstances of the claimed smooch.
he requested that a woman, whose name is redacted in the ITIA's full decision in Oliveira's case, provide a witness statement. She testified that she met Oliveira at a bar in Manzanillo, and that they "ended up kissing" a little after she "consumed a pill which made me feel euphoria, agitation, confidence to socialize and in the moment a a feeling of energy and joy." In a later interview with an ITIA investigator, she confirmed this account, but declined to name the drug out of privacy. … the tribunal ruled that, on the balance of probabilities, Oliveira did not successfully prove that kissing was the source of amphetamine contamination
His problem was a chemical one: his test contained between "four and 36" times too much meth to have been transferred by kissing, according to an expert consulted by the tribunal. He'll be eligible again in January 2029.
Previously:
• Journalist names her baby 'Methamphetamine Rules' as a 'test'
• New study: Fish can get addicted to meth after eating human poop
• Meth dealers use model rocket to hide drugs
• Pennsylvania police chief charged with running drugs
