Shayna Jack emerges at Brisbane home ahead of ASADA showdown
After staying under the radar for days, embattled swimmer Shayna Jack has finally emerged at her Brisbane home, on the eve of her showdown with the anti-doping watchdog. SEE THE PICS
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SWIM star Shayna Jack cut a forlorn figure as she dragged her bin outside her Brisbane home yesterday, ahead of her battle with Australia’s anti-doping watchdog today.
Jack’s professional future is flashing before her eyes as she prepares to meet with the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority in Brisbane.
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Insiders have described the move as unusual, because the watchdog rarely conducts face-to-face interviews with accused athletes.
It comes after Jack’s training partner, Brisbane teen sensation Ariarne Titmus, backed her governing body’s decision to cover up the positive drugs test during last week’s world titles in South Korea.
The meeting suggests that 20-year-old Jack has information to provide in an effort to avoid the maximum four-year penalty that threatens to end her career.
“Normally, in these cases, there wouldn’t be a meeting at all,” a source told The Courier-Mail.
“It’s unusual, but that’s not to say you can’t have a meeting to nut out where are we at the moment? What are the next steps in the process?
“If the athlete has something to offer, around substantial assistance or relevant information about other people, this would be the time to bring it forward.
“Substantial assistance will give you a pretty significant reduction in penalty, but you have to get it on the table early.”
Jack has been keeping a low profile since returning to Brisbane last month, but yesterday emerged to carry out the positively ordinary chore of taking out the bin as she approaches a day that will be anything but average.
It could be the end of her career. If she gets a full four-year ban, it will virtually spell a life ban.
She has spoken only through a statement that she released on Instagram, in which she defiantly claimed: “I did not and would not cheat and will continue to fight to clear my name.
“Every day I wake up and have a rollercoaster of a day,” she wrote.
“Some days I am okay and others I am not.”
In today’s meeting, she will learn how much of the banned substance Ligandrol has been detected in her system.
She’s expected to provide a list of all the supplements and foods she was consuming at the time of the out-of-competition test, on June 26.
She was sent home before last month’s world championships, while Swimming Australia, for two weeks, kept secret the reason of her departure from team members and the public, until the news broke in the final stages of the international competition.
Both Jack and Titmus — the four-time world championship medallist at Gwangju — are trained by leading coach Dean Boxall in Brisbane.
When Titmus was asked yesterday whether she was glad that Jack’s plight had been kept secret, she said: “Yeah. I don’t think it affected the team too much because when we did find out, we had three sessions left and we knew we had to finish our job there.”
Federal Sport Minister Richard Colbeck says the drug-tainted swimmer is in a tough position to clear herself of doping.
But Senator Colbeck said he was satisfied with the way Jack’s positive test had been handled by officials.
“Obviously, Shayna is in a pretty tough position right now,” he said yesterday.
Originally published as Shayna Jack emerges at Brisbane home ahead of ASADA showdown