Athletics: White Banned After Cheating Admission

Kelli White, the American winner of the 100 and 200 metres at the World Championships in Paris last summer, has become the first athlete in history to be banned for a doping offence without having actually tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

The 27-year-old Californian, a training partner of Britain's banned sprinter Dwain Chambers, will be forced to miss this year's Olympic Games in Athens after officials from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) confronted her with evidence of drug use.

White has been officially stripped by the International Association of Athletics Federations of her world titles and had all her results erased starting in December 2000, the time at which she admitted she started using drugs.

She is unlikely to be the last American athlete linked to the San Francisco-based Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco) to be banned by Usada, who claim to have overwhelming evidence against a number of athletes after documents were passed to them by a US Senate committee.

White is one of 12 American athletes, including the sprinters Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, who allegedly received steroids from Balco's owner Victor Conte, according to a report by an Internal Revenue Service investigator.

"Ms White admits she used the substances to be as competitive as she could and several of the substances she used were undetectable," said a statement released on White's behalf yesterday.

"In doing this, I have not only cheated myself, but also my family, friends and sport," she said.

The Ukrainian-born Remi Korchemny, who also trained Chambers, now serving a two-year ban following a positive test for the designer steroid THG last August, coaches White. Korchemny is one of four men, including Conte, charged with running a ring to supply banned drugs.

But it is a measure of the drug problem that persists in athletics that the gold medal White won in the 200m in Paris will now be awarded to Anastasiya Kapachinskaya, a Russian who herself tested positive for steroids at the World Indoor Championships in Budapest in March.