Considering the day he’s having, Shawnacy Barber sounds surprisingly relaxed. Hours earlier, it was reported that he had tested positive for cocaine at Canadian Olympic trials in Edmonton this past July. Also reported was the fact that he had ingested the cocaine during a “tryst” with a woman he met online. These are not exactly the headlines a 22-year-old world champion pole vaulter would hope for.
But Barber, who is talking to a handful of reporters on a conference call from Akron, Ohio, (where he has attended university), seems to be taking it all in stride. He is happy with the process that followed his positive test, which included an arbitration hearing to determine whether he would be allowed to compete at the Rio Games (he was). He sees no connection between the incident in Edmonton and his 10th-place finish at the Olympics—”I went out and I did as well as I could have,” he says. When asked whether he thinks he did anything wrong in Edmonton, Barber describes what happened as a learning experience. “I’m happy for every experience that life gives me,” he says.
Here is what happened in Edmonton, according to the arbitration hearing report. Barber, in search of a casual sexual encounter, placed an ad online, specifying that he was looking for someone who was drug- and disease-free. He arranged to meet a woman in a hotel room. When he arrived, she was in the bathroom, taking cocaine. Barber did not see the cocaine. When the woman emerged, she offered Barber a drink. He declined, and they began to kiss—this is when the cocaine was transferred to Barber, though he did not notice or taste it at the time. Events proceeded from there, and after about a half-hour, Barber returned to his own room.
The Canadian Anti-Doping Program calls for a four-year ban on an athlete who tests positive for any substance that appears on WADA’s prohibited list (as cocaine does). Barber, who was the gold-medal favourite going into Rio, learned that he may not be allowed to compete at the Olympics on July 26, just a few weeks ahead of the Games. His arbitration hearing was held on Aug. 5, the same day as the Opening Ceremony. At that hearing, Barber was banking on a “no fault or negligence” clause in CADP, which offers athletes an exemption from the ban if they can explain how the drug entered their system and can prove that they took it inadvertently, while exercising the “utmost caution.”
The two parties that argued at his arbitration hearing—Barber and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports—were in agreement about the source of the cocaine and the fact that Barber did not take it on purpose or even know that he took it. Where they differed was on the question of whether he exercised the “utmost caution.” The CCES said Barber should have asked more questions of the woman to ensure she wasn’t taking drugs. In fact, they didn’t think he should have been in that room with her at all. “Athletes do not play by the same rules as society at large,” says the arbitration hearing report, in its summary of the CCES’s position, “they play by the anti-doping rules which have always imposed a far more stringent standard. Arranging for random one-night stands with unknown women with an unknown drug history may be acceptable to others—but it is not necessarily acceptable for athletes subject to the CADP.”
The language here seems to stray from the issue at hand. “Random one-night stands with unknown women”? Is the concern about athletes’ urine samples, or about how meaningful their romantic lives are? Or about the character of their sexual partners, those “unknown women”? And though the arbitrator at the hearing ultimately decided in Barber’s favour, he too chimed in on what he considered the unseemliness of the pole vaulter’s behaviour. “Regardless of social trends, ‘acceptable’ is not a word many would use to characterize [Barber’s conduct]. To say that it is acceptable is a sad social commentary,” the report reads in its conclusion. “The Athlete has lost much as a result of his actions by virtue of Rule 9 of the CADP [which stripped Barber of his win in Edmonton] and perhaps for other reasons… Canadian athletes are held to a higher standard. Fortunately for Shawnacy Barber, he has a chance to aim higher.”
No doubt Barber means to aim higher, but quite possibly only literally. He’s not particularly penitent about what happened in that hotel room. “At the end of the day, we all still have lives,” he says when asked if he agrees that athletes should be held to a higher standard. “And we all still try to live our own lives outside of the nine months of travel and everything else that our job requires of us… I live my life in a hotel, so it can be rough at times.” He’ll be more cautious in the future, but he suggests there will be more “online dating” in his future. “People that were around trying to date 15 years ago, they maybe didn’t have the same luxury. But this is 2016. This is the way [things] are going for us.”
