Diribe Welteji, one of the world’s best 1,500m runners, has been banned for two years after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled she failed to comply with a doping test at her home in February 2025.
The ruling strips the 23-year-old Ethiopian of her silver medal from the 2025 World Athletics Indoor Championships in Nanjing and wipes her 3:51.44 personal best — set at the 2025 Prefontaine Classic and previously ranked eighth all-time.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has banned Diribe Welteji Kejelcha (Ethiopia) for 2 years for Failing to submit to Doping Control. The athlete’s sanction runs from 8 July 2025 to 30 June 2027. DQ all results from 25 February 2025 to the date of the CAS award. pic.twitter.com/5ZBXS10wTR
— Athletics Integrity Unit (@aiu_athletics) February 26, 2026
What happened
On February 25, 2025, doping control officers arrived at Welteji’s home for an out-of-competition test. Her husband told them she was asleep. Accounts of what followed were, in CAS’s words, “fundamentally contradictory.” The testers left without a sample.
Ethiopia’s national anti-doping body cleared her. World Athletics appealed, pushing for a four-year ban. CAS split the difference, ruling the violation was negligent rather than intentional — language barriers between her husband and the testing officers were considered a mitigating factor. The ban runs from July 8, 2025 to June 30, 2027.
CAS was direct in its reasoning: “an athlete of [Welteji’s] caliber and experience should have known that she was required to comply regardless of the timing of the visit.”
Who moves up the medal table
With Welteji’s Nanjing silver disqualified, Great Britain’s Georgia Hunter Bell is set to be upgraded to silver, and Australia’s Georgia Griffith — who ran a national indoor record of 4:00.80 to finish fourth — would receive bronze. For Griffith, 29, it would be her first major senior global medal.
What’s next for Welteji
She missed the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo while the appeal was pending. She’ll also miss this year’s racing season. But her ban clears just in time for the 2027 World Championships in Beijing — and she’ll be eligible to qualify for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where a potential rematch with rival Faith Kipyegon could be one of the most anticipated races on the track.
