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UK Athletics is not only navel-gazing after a rough Olympic Games in Tokyo, now they are investigating the involvement of two of their athletes who are allegedly connected to Rana Reider. Reider is the coach of Blessing Okagbare of Nigeria who was suspended during the Games for testing positive for human growth hormone.
Adam Gemili and Daryll Neita are apparently involved with the group run by Reider in Florida. Reider was coaching Okagbare prior to her positive test on July 19.
Okagbare testing positive should be very big news. She is a world championships silver and bronze medallist. Twice the Nigerian won gold medals during the Commonwealth Games. Six times she has captured gold in the African championships and is a 2008 Beijing Olympics silver medallist in the long jump.
She has run as fast as 10.79 in the 100m, 22.04 in the 200m, and has jumped as far as 7.00m in the long jump and 14.13 in the triple jump.
For Gemili and Neita, there is no suggestion of wrongdoing yet, however, apparently, UK Athletes has spoken to their standards, ethics, and rules committee to seek procedural advice over what, if anything, they should do to proceed.
Reiter is an American athletics coach known to train Dafne Schippers of The Netherlands, and American Christian Taylor, and Anguilla-British long jumper Shara Proctor among several others in jumps, sprints, and in the 800m.
Gemili has sprinted as fast as 9.97 for 100m and 19.9 over 200m. He finished fourth in the 200m at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. The former professional soccer player played for Chelsea and Reading.
Neita is a 4 x 100m specialist. She earned bronze in Tokyo as a member of the British relay team and silver during the 2019 Doha World Championships.
