MOSCOW, January 10 (R-Sport) - Russian junior figure skating champion Oksana Nagalati has been banned for one year after admitting to doping, the International Skating Union (ISU) said Thursday.
Nagalati, 17, and her partner Maxim Bobrov won bronze in the pairs event at the Junior Grand Prix in Slovakia in September.
However, Nagalati tested positive at the competition for furosemide, a substance banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. She and Bobrov will now lose their medals.
Nagalati also won the Russian national junior pairs title in February.
The ISU said that Nagalati had admitted taking “one pill of furosemide following the advice of her mother’s family doctor” for a health problem, and had not realized that it was a banned substance.
Furosemide is a diuretic that can also be used as a masking agent to disguise other banned substances.
Nagalati’s explanation of how the drug got into her system “appears to be credible,” the ISU noted. It did not hand her the standard two-year ban for doping, but said that a sanction was needed because of the skater’s “negligence.”
“She wrote a statement of explanation and detailed everything frankly,” Russian Figure Skating Federation director Valentin Piseev told R-Sport. “Instead of a two-year disqualification, which they could have given her, they gave one year on account of her sincere confession."
Nagalati’s ban runs from September 14, 2013, the date when she tested positive, to September 13 this year.
