Wheelchair athlete Jeff Adams has set his sights on competing for Canada in the Beijing Paralympics while acknowledging Tuesday that winning over public opinion might be an even tougher battle despite his exoneration in a bizarre doping scandal.
With his lawyer seated beside him, Adams conceded some might find his explanation fanciful: that an unknown woman put cocaine in his mouth without permission, leading to contamination of his dope-testing catheter.
"If I was going to invent a story, it would have been more believable than this," Adams said.
"It has been painted as a wildly crazy story, but these things happen all the time. I mean, I was in a bar and it was dark, and things like that happen all the time."
On Friday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport lifted Adams’ two-year doping suspension after finding that, even though he had tested positive for cocaine, it was not his fault.
In pleading his case, Adams, 37, of Brampton, Ont., testified he was pretending to be asleep in the now-defunct Vatikan goth bar in Toronto one night two years ago when a woman suddenly pressed her cocaine-laden fingers into his mouth.
That night, he used a catheter to relieve himself at home. He then used the same coke-laced catheter a week later for a drug test after winning a marathon in Ottawa, resulting in a positive test.
Even though he said he had not used the drug, the disgraced athlete was handed a two-year suspension and stripped of federal funding.
Adams spent more than $750,000 in legal fees fighting the decision, which was finally overturned Friday by the arbitration court in Lausanne, Switzerland. In its ruling, the appeal body said it accepted his explanation, corroborated by two witnesses and backed partially by scientific evidence.
The agency decided he had indeed violated the doping rules, but given the "truly exceptional" circumstances of the case, reinstated his eligibility to compete and receive government funding. It did not award costs.
"This really has been the most difficult and hard-fought victory of my life," Adams said.
However, he said support from other athletes at home and abroad was overwhelming.
Among the "avalanche" of supportive e-mails he received were offers from international athletes to help him in his desperate bid to qualify in the next six weeks for the Paralympics, which begin Sept. 6 in Beijing following the conclusion of the Olympic Games.
"It’s no secret that there are some enormous barriers in front of me, and I’m facing some very serious obstacles," Adams said.
"I’m in very good shape. I’ve really been training very hard but ... what’s missing is the sharpness. I need to get back to racing fast."
Adams has blazed a trail for Canadian disabled athletes, winning 13 Paralympic and six world championship medals.
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