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Issam Asinga was hoping to represent Suriname as a sprinter at the Summer Olympics in Paris, but a doping test that killed that dream has now led to him suing Gatorade for allegedly gifting him a product he claims triggered the positive result.
I’m going to assume most people reading this aren’t familiar with Issam Asinga, but if you keep tabs on the world of track and field, you may know the 19-year-old is an incredibly talented sprinter who set the U-20 record for the fastest 100m dash in history after running it in 9.89 seconds at the South American Championships in 2023.
The teenage phenom has certainyly benefited from the genetic boost that comes with being the son of two former Olympians.
His mother, Ngozi Mwanamwambwa, was a sprinter for Zambia who competed in Seoul in Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996. His dad, Tommy Asinga, is native of Suriname (the country his son has also decided to represent) who earend a spot in both of those Games in addition to Seoul in 1988.
Issam was hoping to follow in their footsteps at the 2024 Olympics, but he’s been forced to swap an potential athletic battle for a legal one thanks to what transpired last summer.
According to The Washington Post, Asinga was one of the rising stars Gatorade invited to a ceremony in Los Angeles last July after the brand named him the best boys’ high school track-and-field athlete in Florida. When he arrived, he received a gift bag that included some Gatorade Recovery Gummies, which he started popping after workouts for approximately two weeks.
In August, he got a call from the Athletics Integrity Unit (which handles drug testing for the governing body World Athletics) and was informed he’d failed one of the drug tests he’d taken prior to his aforementioned record-breaking performance after testing positiive for GW1516, a “metabolic modulator” that impacts how the body processes fat.
The outlet reports Asinga subsequently contacted a lawyer who had him put together a list of consumable items that may have led to a positive test before a lab informed them it had run preliminary tests that determined the Gatorade gummies were a potential culprit.
That marked the start of a lenghty saga involving a quest to get gummies from the same batch to confirm the results, accusations Asinga actualy contaminated them himself, and a litany of tests that failed to find GW1516 in other samples but that also suggested enough time had passed where it was no longer detectable.
Now, Asinga—who had his world record stripped and fears he could lose his scholarship at Texas A&M after the AIU hit him with a four-year ban in May—has filed a lawsuit against Gatorade in an attempt to “recoup the millions of dollars he has lost in economic opportunities” by missing out on the Olympics “as well as compensation for the devastating emotional harm he has suffered.”
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how things play out.