Athletics Integrity Unit Provisionally Suspends Olympic Hurdler Cyréna Samba-Mayela

Cyréna Samba-Mayela, the French hurdler who took Olympic silver in Paris, is provisionally suspended while the Athletics Integrity Unit pursues a case over alleged whereabouts failures, and could be kept out of competition for as long as two years.

Her representative drew a firm line between the charge and any suggestion of drug use. “I confirm that Cyréna Samba-Mayela has never returned a positive result on any anti-doping test,” the representative told Agence France-Presse, adding that the procedure “concerns exclusively administrative whereabouts requirements, and not the use of any substance whatsoever.” Samba-Mayela is cooperating and will say nothing further while the case is open, according to the same statement.

The AIU made the suspension public on Friday, Sept. 25, a week after it took effect on Sept. 18, and has not published the dates or nature of the alleged failures. Athletes in the AIU’s registered testing pool have to file their location in advance and name a 60-minute slot each day when they can be found for a test. A filing failure counts the same as a missed test, and once an athlete has three in a rolling 12 months the AIU can charge an anti-doping rule violation. The standard ban is two years, though a tribunal that judges the athlete less at fault can halve it.

Time already served under a provisional suspension counts toward any ban. A full two years dated from Sept. 18 would run into September 2028, beyond the Los Angeles Olympics, which open July 14 that year. Even the minimum would take in most of next season.

Samba-Mayela lost the Olympic final in Paris to Masai Russell by only 0.01 seconds, running 12.34 to the American’s 12.33, with Puerto Rico’s Jasmine Camacho-Quinn third in 12.36. It was France’s only athletics medal of the home Games. She came to Paris as the 2022 world indoor 60m hurdles champion and the reigning European 100m hurdles champion from Rome, and signed with Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track soon after.

After injuries cost her most of the 2025 season, she returned in April with second place at the Addis Ababa Grand Prix. In June, racing close to her training base in Texas, she ran 12.65 for fourth at the Lone Star Grand Prix in College Station and then 12.50 in Georgetown, a time only the Netherlands’ Nadine Visser, with 12.47, had beaten among European women this year. Calf pain came back weeks later, and in late July she pulled out of the European Championships in Birmingham, where she would have been defending her title.

Samba-Mayela is the second French championship medalist suspended over whereabouts this year. The AIU provisionally suspended heptathlete Auriana Lazraq-Khlass, the 2024 European silver medalist, in March. That same month American sprinter Fred Kerley was banned for two years after a tribunal found him “negligent and, to a certain extent, reckless” over three missed tests in 2024.

Tobi Amusan, the world record holder in Samba-Mayela’s event, faced the same charge in 2023 and never served a ban. A disciplinary tribunal cleared her that August, days before the world championships in Budapest, where she was the defending champion. The AIU appealed, and in June 2024 the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that only two filing failures had been established. Gabby Thomas has described getting a similar notice as a student at Harvard and having it thrown out after she challenged the first of her three missed tests.