Athletics Integrity Unit's mishandling of Adaejah Hodge suspension clouds sprinter's future

If you’re wondering whether the banned substance cardarine was the secret sauce fuelling Adaejah Hodge’s audacious 2024 season, when she won gold and silver at world juniors, and reached the Olympic semifinal, the 19-year-old from the British Virgin Islands erased any uncertainty in 22.22 seconds.

That’s how long it took Hodge, completing her first indoor season since a heretofore unexplained absence last year, to win the 200-metre final at NCAA Indoor Championships last Saturday, competing for the University of Georgia. The time established a new personal best and a 2026 world lead, and earned a second trip to the podium for Hodge, who finished second in the 60 metres, and who is a former world junior champ at 200.

I say “former” here for the same reason I raise the spectre of illicit performance enhancers in the opening paragraph.

Two days after Hodge’s NCAA gold medal sprint, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) announced that she had tested positive for cardarine back in the summer of 2024. The test result and the two-year suspension it triggered were logged in real time, but the other consequences — the scrubbing of results from 2024 world juniors, and the elevation of every finalist who finished behind her — didn’t arrive until this week, when the AIU finally made its ruling public.

The AIU only announced Hodge’s suspension after she had finished serving it, and it’s not clear whether they would have spoken up at all if Fitzroy Dunkley, the retired hurdler, hadn’t posted on Twitter wondering out loud about whether Hodge had been serving an unpublicized doping ban. So now we know why Hodge missed the entire 2024-25 NCAA season, along with world championships last summer.

For the record, seven months of the original