CJ Ujah: ‘I had this stain against my name. It hurt so much and still does’

“Obviously, I made a mistake,” says CJ Ujah quietly, as he breaks his 14-month silence on the failed drugs test that led to Team GB’s biggest Olympic doping scandal. “But people make mistakes. I am not a cheat.”

As all that pent-up frustration and pain begins to uncoil, revelation follows revelation. How it was a basic amino acid supplement – bought off Amazon for £10 during lockdown – that caused his positive test in Tokyo. How he thought the email telling him the news was a hoax. And, just as remarkably, that he was not tested in the buildup to last year’s Games, despite being among the world’s leading sprinters.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian shortly after hearing he has been banned for 22 months by the Athletics Integrity Unit, Ujah also discloses the message he gave to his British 4 x 100m relay teammates – Zharnel Hughes, Richard Kilty and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake – after they also lost their Olympic silver medals through no fault of their own. “I told them: ‘Listen. I wouldn’t jump on a flight to Tokyo knowing I could put you in a bad position. I wouldn’t do that’.”

Ujah, it turns out, had been taking a contaminated supplement for weeks before the Olympics. But because his final drugs test was in May 2021 – close to three months before they started – it was never pinged until after he competed in Tokyo.

He pauses. “You know what? I wish I had been tested right before the Olympics, so that I never went,” he says. “That way, I would never have put these other three guys, my teammates, through what they went through as well as myself.”

The rogue supplement, Ujah says, was beta alanine – a naturally occurring amino acid that slightly increases the amount of time an athlete can perform high-intensity exercise,