‘I’m not a drugs cheat, it’s proven’: Chris Wright raring to return after ban

After six months of sweat, toil and motorway service stations, October is a time of calm in the life of a county cricketer. “Normally that one month a year where you can pretty much do nothing,” says Chris Wright, the 39-year-old seamer.

Wright is one of those canny bowlers who puts it on a spot game after game, season after season, turning consistency into a fine domestic career. It began at Middlesex, took in a County Championship title at Warwickshire in 2012, and recent years have been well spent at Leicestershire. Indeed, Wright helmed the attack that won the One-Day Cup in 2023.

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At the start of last October, the county was “delighted to announce” his new two-year contract after he had U-turned on a move to Sussex for family reasons. The following season would probably take him to 600 first-class wickets, the next to professional cricket at the age of 40. All appeared well, until a surprise call in mid-October.

“I was just in my house, chilling out, doing a few jobs, had music on my Bluetooth,” Wright says. “And it cut off because the phone was ringing. So I picked it up and got a call from the guy at the ECB [England and Wales Cricket Board] saying: ‘I’ve sent you an email, you’ve failed a drugs test.’ His words were: ‘Don’t panic, just give the PCA [Professional Cricketers’ Association] a call.’ Obviously, it isn’t a situation where you don’t panic. It’s a ludicrous thing to say.”

Wright was provisionally suspended but it was not until the start of July that his situation was spelled out publicly. A trace amount of the banned substance ostarine had been found in his system. The National Anti-Doping Panel (NADP), in its decision in May, accepted he had taken it unintentionally through a contaminated supplement, but Wright was still given a nine-month suspension backdated to last October. The One-Day Cup, beginning this week, will mark his competitive return to the game.

He has missed it desperately. “Cricket is one of those sports where quite often people playing it think it’s cool to be grumpy about it,” says Wright. “I’m not one of those people, I love the game.” The suspension threatened that love. It forced Wright to give up a winter coaching opportunity with Central Sparks, the regional women’s team, before he set about trying to prove his innocence.

A number of supplements Wright had been using were sent for testing in February, and it was discovered that a bilberry supplement was responsible for the positive test. As stated in the NADP’s decision, the label on the supplement did “not list ostarine, nor any other prohibited substance as an ingredient”. In other words: “I’m not a drugs cheat, it’s proven,” says Wright.

But the process continued until May, with a hearing in front of the Cricket Regulator, which argued Wright was at fault in taking ostarine, even if unintentionally. “In the hearing the regulator, at the last minute, tried to argue that I should get banned for 20 to 24 months,” says Wright. The NADP’s decision cited how, among other reasons, Wright did not research the supplement on the Informed Sport website – where athletes can see if products have been batch tested – nor had he consulted his team doctor over whether it was safe to take.

A lengthier suspension would have been terminal for Wright’s career. “At my age to stop playing cricket for, say, 12 months, I don’t think I could come back from that physically. You need to keep moving and keep the bones greased. If the regulator had their way and they got an obscene 20 to 24 months then, absolutely, I’d have hung the boots up.”

The NADP found Wright’s fault “not significant” but still handed out a nine-month suspension. “Harsh” is Wright’s unequivocal conclusion. “I’ve not harmed anyone, I’ve not tried to cheat, the level of the substance isn’t enough to do anything. I got told this: the amount of ostarine in my system that triggered this [positive] test was equivalent to a grain of sand in an Olympic swimming pool.”

Wright isn’t alone in finding the punishment severe. The PCA, along with the World Cricketers’ Association (WCA) and World Players Association (WPA), is using Wright’s case to urge the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) to change its rules and protect athletes who inadvertently take contaminated substances.

“What’s happened with anti-doping rules is the science has evolved much quicker than the regulations,” says Matthew Graham, head of the WPA. “The science is now capable of picking up readings of trace elements as low as a picogram, which is a trillionth of a gram. When the readings are so sensitive it is incredibly unlikely that an athlete has obtained or sought to obtain any performance-enhancing benefit from the substance.”

Wright isn’t a one-off. Graham points to the example of Lizzy Banks, the former cyclist who was left feeling suicidal after a positive doping test last year in another case of contamination. Banks was ruled by UK Anti-Doping (Ukad) this year of being at “no fault or negligence” though Wada has since appealed against the decision. “There’s a lot of these cases coming through,” says Graham.

The WPA is pushing for thresholds to be introduced for the full range of known contaminants such as ostarine. “The second piece,” adds Graham, “is where these readings are being recorded at such a low level, the burden of proof should be shifted on to the anti-doping authority and, on top of that, there could be further follow-up testing just to confirm this was a bit of an aberration of a result.”

Wright, understandably, has had a difficult few months but is grateful for the support of his county and the PCA, which helped fund his legal representation and testing of supplements. And he’s keen to get back out there. “I love bowling, and I love my teammates. I want to play as long as I can.”

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