Romanian gymnast Ana Barbosu, the 2024 Olympic floor exercise bronze medalist, was provisionally suspended on a charge that she had three drug-testing whereabouts failures in a 12-month span and requested the case go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The International Testing Agency (ITA) charged Barbosu with the anti-doping rule violation, which carries a provisional suspension and, depending on investigations and appeals (such as Barbosu’s to CAS), a possible final suspension of up to two years.
No further details about her case were released.
High-level Olympic sport athletes must provide daily whereabouts, including a specific daily 60-minute time slot, where they will be available for drug testing. Any combination of three missed tests and/or filing failures (failing to provide accurate whereabouts) in a twelve-month span constitutes an anti-doping rule violation.
“I wanted to share and clarify some information that has been circulating,” was posted on Barbosu’s Instagram story after the ITA announcement. “As you can imagine, moving to the US and starting college (at Stanford within the last year) has been a big transition. Navigating through all the changes has been challenging, and I’m continuing to learn and grow through each experience. To be clear, this situation has nothing to do with prohibited substances, and I have been grateful for the guidance and support throughout the process.”
Barbosu, 19, won a floor exercise bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics, though an ongoing appeals process involving American Jordan Chiles’ score could affect the results.
Chiles originally won floor bronze on Aug. 5, 2024, after a U.S. inquiry into her difficulty score during the competition led to it being raised by one tenth. That moved her from fifth place into bronze-medal position, passing Romanians Sabrina Voinea and Barbosu.
After a Romanian appeal, a CAS panel reverted Chiles’ score because the scoring inquiry was recorded as submitted four seconds past the one-minute time limit. Chiles was moved back to fifth place, five days after the competition on Aug. 10, 2024. Barbosu became the bronze medalist.
A month later in September 2024, it was announced that Chiles appealed the court decision to the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. The appeal asserted that CAS refused to consider video evidence found on Aug. 11, 2024 (one day after the CAS ruling) that showed the inquiry was submitted on time.
In January 2026, the Swiss court ruled that CAS must re-examine the case, taking the new evidence into account. CAS has yet to announce a new ruling.
Barbosu recently finished her freshman season at Stanford, becoming the first Olympic medalist from Romania to participate in NCAA gymnastics.
