When 19-year-old Issam Asinga got the call to get tested, he took it as a sign of a bright future, “I was honored when they told me to get tested. I was like, ‘Okay, bet!’ That’s how I know I’m going somewhere.”
What he didn’t expect was for this ‘honor’ to turn into the lawsuit of his nightmares.
Just a couple of months after receiving a goody basket from Gatorade, Asinga tested positive for GW1516, also known as Cardarine. Asinga claims that the p recovery gummies he received in that basket were contaminated and has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Gatorade for the money he has lost “in economic opportunities, as well as compensation for the devastating emotional harm he has suffered.”
Asinga is a rare talent, a prodigy, and the fastest high school sprinter in history and was set to represent Suriname at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. While his parents are from Zambia and Suriname, Asinga was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and currently attends Texas A&M.
Asinga’s father, Tommy, was once a flag bearer for Suriname, and the young sprinter was hoping to follow in his father’s footsteps and make a difference for the country, “I felt like I had more of an opportunity to make a difference running for Suriname,” Issam Asinga said. “In Suriname, the one thing that’s holding them back is the facilities. They don’t have someone who can make that difference. I can use whatever I do in my track career to help better this country.”
Despite his young age, he’s already left a sizeable mark on the track. Last July, Asinga, in his first international competition at just 18 years old, broke the U20 100m record at the South American Championships, clocking 9.89. A few months before, in April, Asinga beat world champion and 2024 Olympian Noah Lyles in a 100m race in Florida with a time of 9.83.
After an impressive year in 2023, Gatorade named Asinga the 2023 Florida boys’ track and field Player of the Year, and he was invited to attend an award ceremony on July 11 in Los Angeles, California.
One month before the Gatorade ceremony, Asinga was made to take a doping test, which returned clean.
Part of being named Gatorade Player of the Year is getting a big gift bag full of Gatorade products, including cherry-flavored Gatorade Recovery Gummies. Gatorade products are known for their use by countless international athletes, as their containers have the ‘NSF Certified for Sport’ stamp. While there are no regulations for supplements or a governing body for testing them, NSF is an independent public health organization and is considered by many to be the gold standard for ensuring clean products.
According to the lawsuit, despite the NSF stamp, Asinga’s mother messaged his coach, Gerald Phiri, a photo of the product’s ingredient label, asking if it was ok to eat. Phiri replied, “Oh yea these are both fine. Gatorade doesn’t make products that are against sporting rules.”
Asinga reportedly took two gummies after workouts for the next two weeks and stopped taking the gummies “on or around” July 25. Meanwhile, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) completed another drug test on Asinga on July 18, less than two weeks before he broke the U20 100m world record in Brazil. The day he broke the world record (July 28), Asinga was tested once again, and that sample returned clean.
However, a call on August 9, 2023, informed Asinga of his worst nightmare: his July 18 drug test had failed. The AIU confirmed that picograms of GW1516 had been detected in his urine.
“It was devastating,” Asinga said. “It was the worst day of my life.”
GW1516, also known as Cardarine, was originally developed as a potential treatment for obesity by changing the way the body metabolizes fat. However, it was not approved for use in food or medication after animal trials revealed that it could cause cancer. While it was not approved for use, it was found to have performance-enhancing benefits for athletes, which created a black market for the product despite it also being banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
With the help of his lawyer, Paul Greene, Asinga did what many athletes do in this situation and compiled a list of all foods and supplements he had consumed that could be tested for GW1516, including the Gatorade gummies.
“We kind of laughed it off,” Asinga said. “It was the last thing I would have thought this source would have been in. This brand is something I’ve looked up to my whole life. Gatorade is a part of sports.”
The gummies were sent to the lab, and on October 26, 223, the lab notified the AIU that the Gatorade gummies had been contaminated with GW1516 based on their “preliminary findings.” The lab later confirmed, after further testing, that the Gatorade gummies were contaminated with GW1516 and even showed the same baseline concentration that had been detected in Asinga’s failed drug test.
After receiving the preliminary findings, Asinga contacted Gatorade to request a sample of the gummies from the same lot number, as the AIU requires. By federal regulation, any company that creates a supplement to be certified must keep samples from each lot for situations like this where they need to be tracked for contamination.
Nearly a month after contacting Gatorade, Asinga received a text message from a representative of the company saying, “Okay so bad news, turns out we discontinued the gummies so we don’t have any more! … They may come back but sound[s] like we’ve had manufacturing issues!”
Following the testing, the lab noted a “large discrepancy in the findings between the two containers of the Gatorade Recovery Gummies,” and the contamination was present on the surface of the gummies rather than uniformly distributed throughout the product. This left the lab to conclude that “it was not possible to rule out deliberate adulteration of the product after it was opened.”
Asinga contacted Gatorade again to request a sealed bottle from his lot number. This time, Gatorade sent him a sample; however, it came from a different lot that had been tested by NSF. The NSF confirmed in a public statement in early June that they had not tested the product from the lot number investigated in Asinga’s case despite being labeled otherwise.
Alexis Chardon, the lawyer representing Asinga in court, said, “They did a bait-and-switch. They said, ‘We don’t have a sealed supplement of the one we gave Issam. But we have this other one. Why don’t you take this one?’ That one was NSF tested. And then they let that lie fester.”
The AIU tested the gummies sent from the different batch, and the results came back clean. Following those test results, the AIU confirmed Asinga’s four-year ban.
“Gatorade created, fed, and encouraged the false narrative that Issam was given ‘clean’ gummies and therefore Issam had adulterated the ones he got tested,” the lawsuit reads.
Two weeks after the NSF released their notice about Gatorade, Asinga received a beacon of hope. Gatorade had found and sent the AIU a sealed bottle from the same lot as Asinga’s gummies. If the sample were tainted with GW1516, it would be pivotal for Asinga’s case.
The tests from the sample came back negative.
Asinga and his team had one more idea.
They contacted other Gatorade award winners who received the recovery gummies. However, when these gummies were tested, they also came back negative. “For a while, it looked like we dug ourselves in deeper,” Chardon said.
Confused about how all the other gummies came back clean, Asinga and his team had one more idea. To prove that the GW1516 became undetectable over the last six months, they decided to retest Asinga’s original gummies.
On July 5, the results for the gummies that had originally tested positive were now negative.
“Gatorade’s delay had cost Issam the possibility of proving contamination in a sealed container from the same lot he had ingested, robbing him of the possibility of ever meeting the AIU’s gold standard test for showing innocent ingestion of a banned substance,” the lawsuit reads.
Asinga hopes that further testing will prove that GW1516 can become undetectable after the six-month period so that he can use that in his appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport later this year.
