Athletes are becoming more susceptible to being spiked and more prone to outlandish explanations if the recent case of a couple of Japanese kayakers is anything to go by

There are all manner of reasons why an athlete might fail a drug test and it seems the rarest, the most exotic of the lot, may just be they were actually cheating. Because it’s an offence very few athletes ever confess to.

There was the cyclist who argued his positive test was down to a vanishing twin he had absorbed in utero. The high jumper who suggested he had been set up by the Cuban-American mafia and the sprinter who explained his testosterone levels were high because he had had a lot of sex with his wife the previous evening. “It was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat.” Well, the cyclist eventually confessed, the high jumper failed a second test and the sprinter was banned anyway.

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Thirty years after the Seoul Olympics, Ben Johnson still insists he failed his test only because his beer was spiked. Johnson admits he was doping at other times in his career but says he would never have been so stupid as to do it in the run-up to the Games. A story has been doing the rounds this week about Russia’s Alexander Krushelnitsky, who tested positive for meldonium at the Winter Olympics. Early reports included the suggestion Krushelnitsky might have been spiked by a disgruntled rival during a training camp.

Which brings us to the strange story of Seiji Komatsu. The news Komatsu had failed a drug test did not figure in the British papers when it broke but then no one ever got rich selling stories about the Japanese kayaking scene. Komatsu, 25, tested positive for anabolic steroids at the Japanese national championships last September. And, like almost every other athlete who has ever failed a drug test, he said he was innocent. Komatsu was one of a group of men competing to be on Japan’s K4 500m team at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. His ban meant, most likely, that his spot would go to the athlete ranked just behind him, Yasuhiro Suzuki, 32.

Suzuki had already quit kayaking when he failed to make the Japanese team at Rio 2016 but his wife persuaded him to try again for the Tokyo Games. Only, Suzuki did not think he could beat Komatsu to a place on the Olympic team, so he decided to cheat him out of it instead. He bought a bottle of anabolic steroids and spiked Komatsu’s drink the day before he raced in the K1 200m final. Suzuki, apparently overcome with guilt, confessed all this soon after Komatsu failed his test. He said he had been inspired to do it by an anti-doping lecture the team had been given before the championships.

Suzuki has been suspended for eight years. The police are investigating a range of allegations against him, including that he also stole his team-mate’s money, passport and paddle to throw him off his game. And Komatsu’s ban has been lifted. He has been vindicated, which makes him unique, in Japan at least.

The Japanese Anti-Doping Agency said Komatsu was the first athlete it knew of who had failed a test because his sample had been deliberately contaminated. But he will not be the last athlete whose unlikely story turns out to be true. As lab technology improves, there are going to be a lot more of these crazy cases.

The equipment technicians use to test samples is so advanced it can detect even the tiniest traces of banned substances. Quantities so low they fall well below the threshold at which the drugs could have any discernible effect. Medication that claims to be 99.99% clean is not much use if the test picks up the .01% , which means contamination has become a real problem.

Take the case of Gil Roberts, who won a gold medal in Rio as part of the USA’s 4x400m team. Roberts tested positive for probenecid, a masking agent. His sample showed a miniscule amount was present in his system. But that was enough to earn him a ban.

The headlines in the Roberts case were all about how he claimed he had been contaminated by kissing his girlfriend. The details, though, involved a series of unfortunate, and unlikely, coincidences. Roberts’ girlfriend caught a sinus infection while she was on holiday in India. Her stepfather took her to a rural pharmacist, who sold her an obsolete medicine called moxylong, which contains probenecid.

Because she could not swallow a pill, she asked them to make up the moxylong in a capsule, so she could pour the powder on to her tongue and wash it down with water. She was still taking this homemade medicine when she got back to the USA and she took a dose right before she spent the afternoon with Roberts.

Roberts was cleared but Wada appealed his case at the court of arbitration for sport. There was a dispute about the science behind his explanation and whether it was possible for the drug to be transferred in that way. But in a contamination case like that, the athlete needs only to prove his or her story on the balance of probability, that, in Cas’s words, “there’s a 51% chance of it having occurred”.

Cas ruled in Roberts’ favour. So these days, the simplest explanation is not always the right one. And when the truth is as weird Komatsu’s or as Roberts’, it’s going to be harder than ever to tell what is fiction and what is not.