When Jack Burke was asked to pee in a cup, he wasn’t worried. He was actually pretty excited about it.

It was July 2013. Burke, a budding competitive cyclist, was riding in the biggest race of his life: after four stages, he led the pack and wore the leader’s jersey at the Tour de l’Abitibi in Quebec. It was pretty much inevitable that Burke would be tested, and he took it as proof that his hard work had paid off. He was finally good enough to be noticed.

“This is cool,” Burke told himself. “I’ve never got to do this before, I kind of feel like I’m a pro now.”

He ultimately finished fourth — his top result in such a prestigious event — and went home to Toronto, pleased with his performance and ready to both prepare for university, and dream about the heights his cycling career could reach.

The 18-year-old didn’t give that drug test in Malartic, the town in northwestern Quebec where the race had been held, another minute’s thought. But a month later, he was scrolling through emails on his phone when one from Union Cycliste Internationale, the global governing body for cycling, caught his eye.

He’d received mass emails from them before, but this one was different.

It was addressed to him. It was about him.

“Dear Mr. Burke,” the email read, “the UCI received notification of an Adverse Analytical Finding from an A sample that you provided.”

In layman’s terms: A positive test. And in the eyes of the people who run his sport, who determine who can compete and who cannot, Burke — who hoped to race for Canada in the Olympics some day — was labelled a possible drug cheat.

What? How did this happen?

“That,” Burke says, “was the worst day of my life.”

This decade has not been great for cycling. In January 2013, Lance Armstrong — once considered one of the world’s greatest athletes — sat on Oprah’s couch and confessed to a decade of cheating. It was an astonishing fall from grace.

Later that year, Ryder Hesjedal, the first Canadian to win a grand tour, was forced to publicly admit that he had doped, and never been caught, earlier in his career. And then there was the February 2012 decision to strip Alberto Contador of his 2010 Tour de France title because of a positive test for clenbuterol.

So a positive test for a national junior cyclist like Burke wasn’t just something that could easily be straightened out, and then forgotten. It could stain Burke’s reputation forever.

That one, businesslike email from the UCI set off a chain of events that would see the young athlete — and his ultra-supportive father — enlist experts to testify on his behalf, learn more than they ever thought possible about drug properties, urine and the contamination of water sources, and take on one of the world’s most powerful sporting organizations to clear his name.

Burke was shaking so much he had to put his phone down on his desk so he could finish reading the email.

The positive test was for a drug called hydrochlorothiazide. Burke was clueless. Now, of course, he’s an expert, but then, he didn’t know that hydrochlorothiazide — HCTZ for short — is a diuretic commonly prescribed to treat high blood pressure and fluid retention.

It’s not a steroid, or a direct performance enhancing drug, but it is banned for use by athletes because it can produce rapid weight loss — useful for boxers, or wrestlers, for example, who are trying to make a weight class. And it can also mask other drugs by increasing urine volume and, through dilution, make it harder to detect a banned substance.

Burke’s sample showed an HCTZ concentration of 0.8 ng/mL. That is less than one billionth of a gram, and a urine specific gravity of 1.021, which is completely normal.

That amount — so trace that few labs in world have equipment sensitive enough to even detect it — and the fact that his urine was not diluted, meant Burke was not masking anything or gaining a performance benefit, according to experts.

But under the World Anti-Doping Code, guilt is presumed and innocence must be proven. Its strict liability standard means athletes are automatically guilty for having the prohibited substance in their system — no matter how it got there. All they can generally do in a hearing is reduce the length of their suspension down to simply a reprimand by proving where the substance came from and that they didn’t intend to take it or enhance their performance with it.

Burke swore he wasn’t doping. So how did the drug get into his system?

That answer would ultimately be why the case of a junior Canadian cyclist, who no one had ever heard of and who had never won a major race, concerned the UCI so much that it appealed the matter all the way to an international Court of Arbitration for Sport tribunal in New York.

The first person Burke called after he found out about failing the drug test was his dad.

Dion Burke did what any parent would do: He told his kid not to worry, that it must be a mistake, and that they’d figure it out.

But no letter arrived saying “whoops, sorry,” and Burke’s coach was indicating that this was a very big deal. Dion Burke took on his son’s worry — plus some of his own — and began doing everything he could to find the source of the hydrochlorothiazide.

His first thought was sabotage. Someone must have spiked his son’s water bottles. The stakes, after all, were quite high: fewer than half the juniors on the Canadian team at that Quebec race would get to compete at the upcoming world championships in Italy.

But when UCI told Dion Burke how tiny the drug concentration was he knew that couldn’t be right. If his son’s bottles had been spiked there would be far more of it in his system.

So, maybe supplements were the problem.

Jack Burke was careful with his vitamins and energy drinks, always checking to make sure the unpronounceable ingredients were approved for use by athletes.

But there have been many cases of athletes testing positive because an allowed supplement included a trace amount of a banned substance. In 2011, Brazilian swimmer Cesar Cielo, a three-time Olympic medallist, tested positive for a diuretic because of a contaminated caffeine pill despite having gone to great lengths to ensure it was safe.

Even if a drug manufacturer fails to properly clean equipment between a batch of prescription drugs and over the counter health supplements, contamination can occur.

Dion Burke gathered samples of all the supplements, everything from Veggie Greens to Louis Garneau Gels, packed his evidence into a Ziploc bag, tossed it in the car and drove to Montreal, to the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab, which was about to test Jack’s B sample. (Athletes give two samples and the second one can be tested to ensure the results of the A sample are correct.)

Maybe they could figure out where the HCTZ came from.

But Dion Burke says he was sent home with his samples, the lab, telling him: “We’re on the other side, we can’t help you.”

“We were totally oblivious to the whole process,” he says. Still, he kept trying. “I was falling asleep at my computer at 4 a.m., researching.”

Dion Burke sells personal care products — everything from dental floss to umbrellas — to drugstores all over Toronto. But after the UCI email, he took on a second, unpaid job: as a private investigator, tirelessly searching for the source of the HCTZ.

He made Burke retrace his footsteps in the days ahead of the test: where did he sleep, eat and drink?

Drink. He found out that his son had filled his water bottles in a different town from the other riders. On the day he was tested, Burke was late getting ready in Rouyn-Noranda — where they slept on mattresses in a school during the tour — and was worried he’d miss the bus to the afternoon race in Malartic, 80 kilometres away.

So Jack Burke got on the bus with five empty bottles and considered himself lucky when he found a woman near the start line willing to unlock a door to the Malartic sports complex and filled his bottles for him from a tap.

“Shhh, don’t tell anyone,” she told him, adding that she didn’t want to unlock the door again to fill more bottles.

Maybe there was a connection there? Dion Burke returned to his computer.

“I started looking into the town of Malartic,” he says, “and one Google search led to another.”

It’s an open-pit gold mining town and he found company documents and official plans detailing the sensitivity of the local water table and stories about waste water sludge being spread on the land. The town’s well water was only chlorinated — not treated with more sophisticated processes, which are better at filtering out pharmaceuticals excreted into waste water.

Dion was discovering that some pharmaceuticals, like HCTZ, aren’t fully filtered out through water treatment and have impacted fish and been found in drinking water.

“I thought, holy jumping,” he recalled. “Maybe it’s in the water?”

Dion Burke’s legwork had taken nearly a month. The hearing was only a couple days away, and they needed a lawyer — one willing to take on the case for nothing, because that was just about what the family could afford to pay.

James Bunting, a partner at Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg with considerable experience in sports-related disputes, was the first to return his call and hear his water theory.

“I was highly skeptical,” recalls Bunting, sitting in his Toronto law offices with his co-counsel on the case, Chantelle Spagnola. “But something in his voice made me not hang up.”

While his dad had played detective, Jack Burke tried to focus on training for the world championships, an event that was now just around the corner.

The junior time trial was Sept. 24, 2013, in Firenze, Italy, so a hearing — that would determine whether he could compete — was hastily scheduled. Richard McLaren, a Western University law professor and respected sports arbitrator, was appointed and the hearing was held at law offices in Toronto on Sept. 17.

“I’m seeing all these lawyers in suits and I’m walking in an American Eagle shirt and khakis,” Jack recalls. “My parents don’t have very much money, and neither do I, so I don’t own a suit.”

“All the money I’ve ever earned has gone into the bike,” Burke says. “Every decision I’ve ever made in life is about cycling, whether I’m going to eat this or do that or do my homework tonight or go training, it’s all about cycling.”

Burke’s university application video summed up his recent years in six-and-one-half whirlwind minutes.

Get up at 4 a.m. Down eight raw eggs. Ride from his north Toronto home down to the lake and back for a “short” 75 km ride. Go to high school. Sandwich in an hour-long ride. Go to work at Sporting Life to pay for the bike. Ice bath. Bed. And repeat.

But at the hearing, Jack Burke found himself in a different world. He listened as lawyers, a toxicologist, pharmacologist and water expert, decided his future and whether all his work would ultimately be rendered meaningless.

“I wanted to scream: I didn’t do this,” Burke says. “But obviously, anybody who does it is going to say they didn’t do it so that didn’t come across to me as something that would be very effective.”

Frustrating as it was for him, the most crushing thing was clearly seeing the effect of it all on his father.

“That was the first time I saw my dad cry,” Burke recalls. “I was raised in this family, guys don’t cry, be tough.

“This whole time my dad has been working night and day. I don’t think he slept for the longest time, just trying to figure out how this happened. He was incredibly afraid of how expensive it was going to be and worried about the fact that we might not be able to defend me because we couldn’t afford it.”

After six-and-one-half hours, the hearing concluded and Jack went home to pack for Italy, hoping he’d win — and in time.

Burke was standing in the airport check-in line — his teammates wondering if he’d get to travel with them — when the call from the lawyer finally arrived.

“We won,” Bunting said. “You’re good to race.”

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The ruling itself was released later.

“The athlete did not purposely ingest HCTZ,” McLaren wrote in his full judgment.

The drinking water in Malartic was not tested because no sample had been taken when Burke drank it — who would have ever thought that was necessary? — and the experts agreed that testing it now wouldn’t be useful as water conditions would be different.

But, after expert testimony, McLaren determined that the HCTZ “entered the athlete’s body through contaminated drinking water obtained from the town of Malartic.”

One of the experts was Dr. Deborah Ross, a water and waste water expert who evaluated the vulnerability of water supplies to contamination after the Walkerton, Ont., tainted-water disaster that killed seven people and left thousands sick from E. coli bacteria.

She testified that HCTZ — which is flushed down toilets daily by the many people who are prescribed the drug — was particularly resistant to chlorination, the only water treatment used in Malartic. And, she continued, runoff from waste water sludge and biosolids, which are routinely spread by mine operators and farmers, can seep into water supplies.

Jack Burke’s father was right: it was something in the water, and his only crime was drinking from an unfortunate source.

But under the anti-doping code’s strict liability standard he was still considered guilty for having a banned substance in his body, no matter how it got there. Accordingly, McLaren disqualified his Tour de L’Abitibi results and gave Burke a reprimand, which would count as a first doping offence.

Under the code, this was as good as it could get for an athlete.

Until, that is, the UCI appealed and Burke came away with something that seemingly no athlete has ever managed before.

On the last day possible, UCI appealed to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest authority.

UCI did not return calls for comment.

Burke, his dad and lawyers convened in New York this past April before Hugh Fraser, an Ontario court judge and member of the Dubin inquiry into the drug scandal following the 1988 Olympics when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal.

The UCI’s appeal, Fraser noted, stated that “it cannot accept that the level of any possible contamination in the relevant water sources was sufficient to cause the athletes’ adverse analytical finding for HCTZ.”

UCI argued that it was more likely Burke ingested the banned substance through a contaminated supplement.

Spanish cyclist Contador argued that his positive test for clenbuterol came from eating tainted beef but the tribunal in that case disagreed, ruling that it was more likely to have come from tainted supplements and handed him a two-year suspension.

But here Fraser came down even more strongly on Burke’s side.

Fraser again concluded that his positive test resulted from drinking HCTZ-contaminated water in Malartic but he also went a step further. He ruled that Burke bore “no fault” and didn’t deserve the reprimand.

“The athlete was a very credible witness and a very honest young man,” he noted, before making UCI pay the bulk of the court costs and $5,000 towards Burke’s expenses.

Burke’s case, according to Paul Greene, a leading American sports lawyer with extensive knowledge of cases in North America and Europe, seems to be unique.

It’s the first tap water contamination case and Burke is the first athlete to escape a reprimand that Greene and his colleagues have ever heard of. (As the Court of Arbitration for Sport does not publish all its cases, it’s impossible to know for certain.)

Concern over contaminated supplements goes back a decade, and more recently anti-doping authorities have warned athletes about dangers in China and Mexico, where a positive test after eating clenbuterol-contaminated meat is a serious risk. But a positive drug test from tap water in Canada could take contamination fears to a whole new level.

“Federations are always concerned about potential precedent,” Greene says. That’s why UCI appealed the case.

“There are environmental factors that are creeping into the testing,” says Greg Mathieu, CEO of Cycling Canada. “The national anti-doping organizations and the laboratories are going to have to take a very hard look at where they draw the threshold lines, which is always a challenge,” he says, referring to the trace amount picked up in Burke’s test.

Elite sport needs an anti-doping system to catch athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs. But the flip side of increasing environmental contaminants and new testing that can pick up the tracest of amounts is that innocent athletes, like Burke, are vulnerable to being caught up in the process.

“The technology has outstripped, in some cases, our ability to interpret the results,” says Timothy Robert, the chief science officer at Aegis, a chemical and drug testing laboratory, and expert at the hearings.

There’s been years of debate at scientific and legal conferences about introducing thresholds for diuretics, so trace amounts — that can’t mask other drugs or enhance performance — wouldn’t send up red flags. So far, nothing has changed.

“It’s a complex topic,” Robert says. “But I think it’s something that needs attention and needs to be resolved, and as time goes by this is going to become a much, much greater problem.”

It is impossible to do more, within the system, to prove you’re not a doper than Burke did. But in cycling, where cynicism runs especially high, the court of public opinion metes out its own judgment.

That reality became clear to Jack Burke at a race in Quebec this spring.

“I was having a terrible day,” he recalls. “I was just so sick, coming back from being injured, and we’re going up this climb and I’m starting to get dropped off.

“Someone I don’t even know rode by me and said, ‘You’re not so great without that Malartic water are you?’ ”

After a particularly nasty string of Facebook comments — made by people he’d never met, and generally assuming he was guilty, Burke lashed back. But that just fuelled the fire.

“I knew it was going to get bad but no matter how much I thought about it I wasn’t really ready to hear all that stuff,” Burke says.

“My entire life, I had nothing in cycling and now I was finally getting somewhere, people were starting to know my name, and I was starting to become a somebody and now people are saying it’s because you’re on drugs. It’s not.”

After that experience, Burke retreated into training and looked for solace where he could find it — turning to Rocky movies, and absorbing the message about triumph over adversity.

“It ain’t about how hard you hit,” he quotes the film, verbatim. “It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

“I have that written on my wall.”

“Jack is the case of the innocent cyclist,” says his lawyer Bunting.

The highest authority in sporting law has said so.

But, still, it’s tough for the average person to understand the difference between Burke, who violated anti-doping laws by accidentally consuming something that didn’t enhance his performance, and someone who jabs a steroid in his thigh.

“People hear violation and they assume doper,” Bunting says. “Jack’s case reminds us that not all athletes who test positive for prohibited substances are dopers.”

But, on Tuesday, Burke’s name went up on the UCI anti-doping rule violation list — which includes the likes of Armstrong — to disqualify his results from the Tour de l’Abitibi (out of fairness to other riders because he had a banned substance in his body) and few will understand that he did nothing wrong.

And that’s tough for a father to accept.

“Now, you Google my son’s name and it’s the first thing that comes up,” he says. “I know he’s lost sponsorship chances because of it. It’s following him.

“He blocks it out a lot, just immerses himself in his riding. It’s crushing us, his mother and I. It’s been devastating to us, not being able to make people understand. No matter how much you talk about it, people don’t get it.”

The arcane detail of the specific levels of gravity in urine or that trace amounts of drugs survive sewage treatment and can be in our tap water generally escapes people, he thinks: “Two hours, five hours, there’s not enough time to make people understand what we’ve been made to understand.”

For Jack Burke, one of the purest ways to prove his innocence is by doing what he’s always done: his best.

“I can’t give up,” he says. “I have to keep training, and keep up my results, or people will always say, ‘It’s because he doped.’”