Australian Olympian Thomas Fraser-Holmes stands to miss next year’s Commonwealth Games after being hit with a 12-month ban for missing a trio of drug tests.
Fraser-Holmes faced a Fina (International Swimming Federation) hearing late on Wednesday night in the hope of avoiding a suspension.
But the panel returned with a ban that would see him miss any competition for a 12-month period.
The 25-year-old stands to appeal the finding at the Court of Arbitration for sport.
Another prominent Olympian, butterfly silver medallist Madeline Groves, also has to face a Fina hearing to defend similar allegations.
Groves is in Europe preparing for a series of races with the Dolphins ahead of the Fina World Championships in Budapest.
Fraser-Holmes, a Newcastle swimmer who trains on the Gold Coast, missed a pair of tests after the Rio Olympics when he was in the midst of search for a new coach.
He had his third strike entered earlier in the year when he was 10 minutes late in getting home from a dinner at his mother’s house. That would see him miss the window entered in the Whereabouts app used by elite athletes to ensure their availability for testing.
“I’m not running away from anything. I made the mistake of not being home,” Fraser-Holmes said after the Fina breaches were revealed.
“I’m guilty of a human error, of pretty much just spending some time with my family. Just as normal families do we were just chit-chatting away and it got to five to nine and I realised what time it was.
“The only thing I could do was to change my Whereabouts time to 15 minutes later. I didn’t know there were drug testers there. I had no way of knowing until a couple of weeks later I had the email that I’d missed the test.”
Fraser-Holmes won the 200m freestyle at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games and swam in three events in Rio. He is currently in Monaco with the rest of the Australian squad, but is ineligible to race.
Groves, meanwhile, remains hopeful of having her third strike reversed before a hearing. She contends she was in the allotted place at the allotted time but Fina testing agents failed to locate her at her American university dorm.
Open water swimmer Jarrod Poort also has a case to answer with Fina after amassing three strikes but has yet to publicly state his reasons for the missed tests.
