UST LADY Jin Esther Marie Singson is back in the national training pool early March after her two-year ban from joining international competitions due to alleged doping to win a South East Asian (SEA) Games gold.
“It feels great that the ban has finally ended,” Singson, the 2005 UAAP MVP, told the Varsitarian. “It is very heartwarming and I feel motivated to train harder.”
Singson, who scored a 4-2 victory against Indonesian Juana Wangsa Putri in the bantamweight division to win the country’s first SEA games gold in taekwondo, was suspended by the International Taekwondo Federation (ITF) after she was found positive for diuretics during the post-SEA Games drug testing.
The then Education sophomore Singson, however, denied taking steroids but admitted taking Kankunis, a slimming tea that contains diuretics. She earlier confirmed that she drank the slimming tea to reach the 55-kg. weight limit in time for the SEA Games. Although it is not considered performance-enhancing, diuretics is capable of making steroid-use undetectable. This made the ITF presume she was using steroids.
Apart from the two-year ban, Singson was stripped of her bantamweight gold, lost the P100,000 cash incentive given by the government to each of the 113 gold medalists, and was replaced by Katlyn Eunice Alora in the 15th Asian Games in Doha, Qatar. Alora bowed to Singson’s SEA Games opponent in the semifinals and settled for the bronze.
“I still stand by my claim that I didn’t know that Kankunis contained a prohibited substance,” she said. “My purpose is just to make the weigh-in.”
