Salwa Eid Naser, the 400m world champion from Bahrain, was under the scanner for doping violations. There was a possibility that she could face a ban for 12 months. However, in a remarkable and confused state of events, Salwa Eid Naser has escaped a dope ban. The reason - A ‘confused’ dope tester knocked on a door containing gas canisters by mistake for a solid hour. According to a Guardian report, an independent tribunal that was formed to investigate this matter stated that the doping control officer who had come to test Naser in Bahrain in April 2019 had been thrown off by the unusual numbering system on the buildings around her apartment.
As a result, the tester spent an hour knocking on a door that “was in fact a storage unit and contained a number of gas canisters which are immediately visible when you look up above the door”.
However, the tribunal was critical of Naser, pointing out she had not put a telephone number in her World Anti-Doping Agency athlete system and also lived in an apartment with no intercom or buzzer. The main reason why Naser escaped the ban was that filing failures are backdated to the start of each quarter – in this case, January 01. This meant technically, she had not had three failures in a 12-month period.
Born as Ebelechukwu Agbapuonwu in Nigeria, Salwa Eid Naser began running at the age of eleven while at school and began to focus on the longer 400 m distance. She was the 2013 Schools Champion but in 2014, she switched allegiance to Bahrain, converted to Islam, and changed her name.
Naser had her first success at the 2014 Arab Junior Athletics Championships, where she was the gold medallist in both the 200 metres and 400 m. Following this achievement, she began to take the sport more seriously and set a new best of 54.50 seconds at the Asian Trials for the 2014 Summer Youth Olympics. She steadily improved her best further at the Youth Olympics, recording 53.95 seconds in the first round before taking the silver medal behind Australia's Jessica Thornton.
Naser took her first senior title at the 2015 Military World Games in October and she became the youngest-ever winner of that title.
She won the silver medal at the 2017 World Championships but she achieved glory when she ran the third-fastest 400m in history when winning gold at the world championships in Doha in 2019.