Daniel Do Nascimento Is Missing. Anti-Doping Officials Lost Contact With Him in 2024.

Brazil’s athletics federation has asked the country’s running community to help find Daniel do Nascimento, the South American marathon record holder, whose family reported him missing to police 38 days after he was last seen.

The Confederação Brasileira de Atletismo made its appeal Monday, the same day relatives filed a report in Paraguaçu Paulista, the city in western São Paulo state where do Nascimento lived with his mother and five siblings. The São Paulo state public security department said the civil police had opened an investigation into the disappearance, reported by a family member who told officers there had been no contact since June 19 and that he does not have a mobile phone, according to a statement given to CNN Brasil. Do Nascimento turned 28 on Tuesday.

His mother, Valdirene Paula Ferreira, posted an appeal on Instagram on Monday. She wrote that her son, known by the nickname Armero, left the house on June 19 at about 7 p.m. carrying only a black backpack, and that he has psychological problems.

Ferreira told Metrópoles, which first reported the disappearance, that she believes he may be disoriented and that the two had been working together growing cassava. Someone messaged her to say he had been seen walking toward Assis, about 22 miles (36K) away. “In that message, the person told me that Daniel asked for water and said he still had a long way to walk,” she said, according to a translation. “After that, nobody could tell me anything more about him.”

Do Nascimento has been hard to reach for close to two years, according to the Athletics Integrity Unit’s published decision in his doping case. His career manager, Flavio Schuler, asked anti-doping authorities for extensions in July and August 2024 on the grounds that the athlete was struggling with his mental health, and submitted a handwritten medical document the unit described as “largely illegible and indecipherable.”

On Sept. 24, 2024, Schuler told the AIU that do Nascimento was unreachable. Between Nov. 25 and Dec. 2 that year, AIU representatives communicated with him through his wife on WhatsApp. In February 2025, after six months without a substantive response, the unit said it would proceed to charge him and asked Schuler to make sure the athlete had support in place. Do Nascimento never gave an explanation for his positive tests and was deemed under the rules to have waived his right to a hearing.

He provided two out-of-competition urine samples in Rio de Janeiro, on July 4 and July 7, 2024, in the weeks before the Paris Olympics. Both contained drostanolone and metenolone, and the first also contained nandrolone. All three are anabolic steroids prohibited at all times. The standard four-year sanction was raised to six because he had used multiple substances, then cut by one year for early admission. His five-year period of ineligibility began July 15, 2024, the date of his provisional suspension, and runs to July 15, 2029. He will be ineligible for the whole of the Los Angeles Olympics.

Do Nascimento set the South American and Brazilian marathon record of 2:04:51 at the Seoul Marathon on April 17, 2022, finishing third behind Mosinet Geremew and Herpasa Negasa. It stands as the area record for the Americas. Three months later he was eighth in the marathon at the World Championships in Oregon in 2:07:35, and in April 2023 he ran 2:07:06 for fourth in Hamburg, the first Brazilian to meet the qualifying standard for Paris.

Outside Brazil he was better known for two races he did not finish. At the Olympic marathon in Sapporo in 2021 he ran with the leaders, exchanged a fist bump with Eliud Kipchoge, and dropped out. At the 2022 New York City Marathon he went through 10K in 28:42 and halfway in 61:22 in warm and humid conditions, led alone for more than 20 miles, and collapsed at the roadside with five miles to run, as LetsRun reported at the time.

The police investigation is open. Ferreira posted again on Tuesday, on his birthday, with a photograph of the two of them together. “Congratulations, Daniel, come back home,” she wrote, according to a translation.