Veteran English T20 batter Laurie Evans racked up £500,000 in legal fees and experienced suicidal thoughts during an unsuccessful four-year bid to clear his name, ESPNcricinfo reported.
Evans tested positive for ostarine during the 2022 Men’s Hundred while playing for the Manchester Originals. The substance mimics the effects of anabolic steroids.
Evans immediately denied wrongdoing and served a provisional suspension over the 2022-23 winter, which officials lifted in March 2023. In May 2024, the National Anti-Doping Panel ruled that Evans bore no significant fault or negligence.
UK Anti-Doping appealed that decision unsuccessfully. The World Anti-Doping Agency then launched a third appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport partially upheld the final appeal, handing Evans a backdated two-year ban and removing two years of cricket from his records. Judges ruled that Evans rebutted the presumption of intent to dope, but he could not specify how the substance entered his body.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport judgment was published on October 29, nearly four years after Evans received notification of the positive test. Evans discussed the ordeal in an interview with Mike Atherton in The Times.
“I truly hope no one else has to go through the same trauma,” Evans said, according to ESPNcricinfo. “I became depressed and numb to everything. My world was turned upside-down. I didn’t leave the house for weeks. I felt like I dying inside. I was prescribed medicine to help with suicidal thoughts.”
Evans added that he was gutted with the appeal outcome. “These four years were not about whether I was a doper,” he said. “The science is there to prove that I wasn’t. I had to find the contaminated product, which we didn’t do.”
The panel noted in Evans’ favor that he had won two previous acquittals and passed approximately 20 career drug tests without an adverse finding. Messages showed he practiced notable diligence, checking supplement safety with the ECB and declining a sponsor’s breakfast cereal because the protein lacked batch testing.
According to Professor Pascal Kintz, an expert who advised the panel, the positive result was much more likely caused by contamination; intentional consumption would have required ongoing doses to work and therefore would have appeared in hair testing. Evans’ hair analysis showed no evidence of repeated, large-dose use of ostarine.
Richard Gould, the ECB’s chief executive, said that the governing body felt Evans’ positive test was “a clear case of contamination” and that he had fallen victim to a “heavy-handed and flawed system”.
The backdated suspension commenced on May 28, 2024. Evans scored 1,395 T20 runs for six different teams during the invalidated period, including a career-best score of 118 not out for Surrey against Glamorgan.
Because the suspension has already been applied, Evans won’t have to sit out any more matches, having recently secured a one-year agreement with Essex last month while mentioning that he wanted a “new challenge” at 39 years old.
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