Canadian Olympic bronze medalist Alysha Newman banned after missed drug tests

Team Canada is under the microscope again.

Canadian Olympic bronze medalist pole vaulter Alysha Newman has been banned from her sport for 20 months after missing drug tests, though track and field investigators accepted she had ended her career as a pole vaulter. 

Newman won bronze for Canada at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

She more recently competed at a pair of Diamond League meetings in May 2025 in Qatar and Morocco.

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Newman is the latest Team Canada athlete involved in a controversy after incidents during and around the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Two controversies surrounding Canadian winter sports teams in early 2026 involve allegations of rule violations in curling and competition manipulation in skeleton. 

Canadian curlers were accused of "double-touching" stones at the Milan Cortina Olympics, while the skeleton team was found to have manipulated a Lake Placid race to protect Olympic qualification points, causing a major uproar.

The Athletics Integrity Unit said Newman was unavailable for an unannounced doping control session in February 2025 and twice more in August. Three so-called "whereabouts" failures in a 12-month period can be prosecuted as an anti-doping rules violation.

After the third incident, the AIU said in its published verdict, the athlete told a sample collection official "she had to leave immediately to participate in the filming of a television game show."

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The global anti-doping system requires athletes to specify a one-hour period each day when they will be available to give a sample for testing.

Newman's suspension expires in August 2027 and was less than the standard two years for whereabouts cases because the AIU accepted that she had decided to end her career.

This, the AIU said, "is a sufficiently unique/exceptional factor that may be considered in assessing her level of fault in the matter."

Newman also competed in two world championship finals, was a gold and bronze medalist at the Commonwealth Games and took bronze at a Pan American Games.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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