Canadian Olympian Shawn Barber tested positive for cocaine before Rio thanks to Craigslist hookup

Oct 6 2016, 10:39 pm

The Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada released a report on World Champion and Olympic Canadian athlete Shawn Barber that is, well, probably pretty embarrassing for the 22-year-old.

It seems that while training in Edmonton before the Olympics, Barber wanted to partake in a little extracurricular pole vaulting of his own as “a way to relieve stress.”

Naturally, the millennial didn’t hit the streets to find someone, instead turning to everyone’s favourite corner store of the internet: Craigslist. More specifically, the ‘Casual Encounter’ section.

Barber, to his credit, used a pseudonym and specified in his post that he was looking for a “professional,” assuming that a professional would be much more likely to stay away from drugs and alcohol. And it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with drugs and alcohol as the very next day he was set to compete in the Canadian Championships.

And guess what, he went on to set a Championships record, win the competition entirely, and secure himself a spot in Rio.

(You know what they say, cocaine’s a hell of a drug.)

That night, after the Championships had concluded, Barber’s blood and urine were tested and “The certificates of analysis indicate[d] the presence of cocaine metabolite (benzoylecgonine) estimated at 96 ng/mL in the “A” sample and at 85 ng/mL in the “B” sample.”

So here’s what happened. It turns out that before meeting a stranger in a hotel room for sex some people like to get a little high on blow first. Weird. Oh, and they also tend to enjoy a another bump in the bathroom before officially getting down. Super strange, right? And it turns out the woman Barber met up with had done exactly those two things. Through kissing her, Barber accidentally ingested enough of the woman’s cocaine to test positive.

Luckily, the woman involved testified at the hearing saying that there was no way Barber knew about her cocaine use. And, after a long process that tried to determine whether or not Barber had done any wrong here, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport eventually decided that the pole vaulter had committed what could be considered risky behaviour, but that ultimately, he could not have known that he was ingesting cocaine and that he had taken just enough precautions to prove this was not his intention.

Barber, however, was stripped of his Canadian Championship (when you high, you high, yo) but was reinstated in time to go to Rio.

Of course, he shit the bed there.

Whether that’s because he was stressed out for an entire month before the competition or it has more to do with not being able to relieve stress, we’ll let you decide.

Daily Hive StaffDaily Hive Staff

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