In July, 2012, Carolina Kostner, an Italian figure skater who had twizzled her way toward a World Championship title, earlier that year, was visited at her home by antidoping authorities. But the officials weren’t there for Kostner; they were looking for Alex Schwazer, her boyfriend at the time and an Olympic race walker who’d won a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Games. Kostner told the officials that Schwazer was not there, and said that she did not know about his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Drug testers eventually caught up with Schwazer, and he tested positive for a banned substance the next day. Although he got to keep his Olympic medal, officials gave him a three-and-a-half-year competition ban, disqualifying him from competing at the 2012 London Games and ultimately leading him to quit the sport.

Kostner went on to win a bronze medal at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi; meanwhile, Schwazer admitted to buying banned substances and said that he lied to Kostner about storing them in her refrigerator. She has been locked in a battle with Italian Olympic officials and international antidoping authorities ever since, and she missed a hearing on the matter in September. Last week, the Italian Olympic Committee announced that Kostner will serve a sixteen-month suspension for her role in Schwazer’s doping. Giuseppe Gambardella, Kostner’s manager, said that the skater had “no idea” about Schwazer’s admitted drug usage and had fully coöperated with investigators.

“Considering that Carolina had no knowledge at all of the doping use,” Gambardella said, “we consider that she cannot be found guilty of assisting him, or aiding and abetting his doping, if she was unaware of this.” Kostner plans to appeal her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a quasi-judicial body that settles disputes.

When it comes to doping, athletes seldom act alone: Lance Armstrong employed a cast of characters around the world in a “sophisticated, professionalized” doping program, and Alex Rodriguez engaged his cousin and the quirky personae of South Florida’s “anti-aging” scene. To completely eradicate performance-enhancing drugs from sports, the thinking goes, harsh punishments must be used to deter not only athletes but the entourages surrounding them.

A spokesman for the World Anti-Doping Agency declined to comment on the Kostner matter, but said that, in general, the WADA code “is clear when it relates to complicity.” The agency bans “assisting, encouraging, aiding, abetting, conspiring, covering up or any other type of intentional complicity involving an anti-doping rule violation.” WADA doesn’t actually perform the testing, however; it is instead the responsibility of signatory national antidoping organizations to follow WADA rules and provide sanctions. The code is “intended to be specific enough to achieve complete harmonization on issues where uniformity is required, yet general enough in other areas to permit flexibility on how agreed-upon antidoping principles are implemented.”

But, in practice, antidoping sanctions can be a legal gray area, and authorities frequently don’t have the same powers as they would in a civil or criminal court. They often cut deals with athletes in exchange for information, creating a hodgepodge of punishments. Typically, authorities focus on the athletes who are using banned substances. Much to the frustration of their competitors, athletes or personnel who assist or observe the doping are left alone, or get off easily. “Usually, punishment hasn’t extended to those parties,” Andrew Brandt, the director of the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law, at Villanova University, said. “But we all know they’re part of it.” The Kostner case, he said, “is a unique application of legal enforcement to an ancillary party.”

While some American governing bodies have begun targeting coaches, the area of boyfriends and girlfriends is a “slippery slope,” Kim Keenan-Kirkpatrick, the senior associate athletics director for compliance at Seton Hall, said. Keenan-Kirkpatrick travelled as an assistant track coach for the U.S. to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Schwazer won his gold medal. To investigate a third party, she said, antidoping officials would have to assemble evidence that told a story about what an individual’s specific role was, rather than relying a positive drug test from a lab, a lofty task for officials already overwhelmed and criticized for lax enforcement. “What level of proof are you dealing with? Is it guilt by association?” Keenan-Kirkpatrick said, of Kostner’s case. “What proof do the Italians have that she was involved?”

For people who don’t fall under the jurisdiction of an athletic organization, punishment can be even more anemic, such as banning someone from attending a competition. Organizations may also find that pursuing ancillary characters may not be worth their time or resources, which already pale in comparison to those of many of the athletes they govern. But, because Schwazer’s girlfriend happens to be an Olympian herself, officials have something to take away, Dick Pound, an International Olympic Committee member and past chairman of WADA, said. “I think it’s really directed at the folks doing this in the sport,” he said about Kostner’s punishment. “If, in your entourage, you have a girlfriend who isn’t an Olympic athlete, probably not much is going to happen.”

Cynics were quick to dismiss Kostner’s sanction as a move by officials to try and look tough on athlete drug usage rather than a genuine effort to improve what many see as a pervasive problem in sports. “It’s to give the thought that it’s working,” Charles Yesalis, professor emeritus of health and human development at Penn State, said. “I don’t think it is. They’re trying to show merit in what they’re getting paid for.”

Whether punishing Kostner was the right or wrong decision is less relevant than the deeper issues surrounding the use of banned substances in sports, Yesalis said. “You don’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to view a sporting event to see average people do average stuff.” He added that, when it comes to enforcement and investigating who to punish in doping cases, “it’s difficult to develop an overwhelming consensus of what’s too far and what’s not far enough.”

Regardless of the Schwazer matter, Kostner had planned, before the ruling, to take a year off from competition, Gambardella said. She has “not decided anything regarding her future as yet.” The sixteen-month ban will conclude in May, 2016, giving her plenty of time to pursue a berth at the 2018 Winter Games, in Pyeongchang, South Korea. At that point, she will have just turned thirty-one, considered practically ancient for a figure skater, but the sanction would also impact her should she want to go into coaching. As Kostner appeals the ruling, her battle with antidoping officials may be less about the logistics of returning to the sport than about her legacy.

“If Alex's mother had answered the door, we wouldn't be speaking about this now,” Gambardella said.