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Team Canada is under scrutiny again.
Canadian Olympic bronze medalist pole vaulter Alysha Newman has been banned from her sport for 20 months after failing drug tests, even though free track investigators accepted she had ended her career as a pole vaulter. Newman won bronze for Canada at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
She recently participated in a pair of Diamond League events in May 2025 in Qatar and Morocco.
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Alysha Newman of Team Canada celebrates her bronze medal and poses with the Canadian flag during the women’s pole vault final at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Stade de France on August 7, 2024. (Daniela Porcelli/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)
Newman is the latest Team Canada figure to spur controversy following incidents in and around the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Two controversies surrounding Canadian winter sports teams in early 2026 involve allegations of rules violations in curling and competition manipulation in skeleton. Canadian curlers were accused of “double-touching” stones at the Cortina Olympics in Milan, while the skeleton team was found to have rigged a Lake Placid race to protect Olympic qualification points, causing a major uproar.
The Athletics Integrity Unit said Newman was unavailable for an unannounced doping test last February and twice more in August. Three so-called “whereabouts” failures in a 12-month period can be prosecuted as an anti-doping rule violation.
In the third incident, the AIU said in its published ruling that the athlete told a sample collection officer “she had to leave immediately to participate in the filming of a television game show.”
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The Global Anti-Doping System requires athletes to indicate a period of one hour each day during which they will be available to provide a sample for testing.
Newman’s suspension expires in August 2027 and was less than the two-year standard for residency cases because the AIU accepted that she decided to end her career.
This, the AIU said, “is a sufficiently unique/exceptional factor to be taken into account in assessing her level of fault in the case.”
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Flag bearers Charles Hamelin and Marie-Philip Poulin carry Team Canada’s flag during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at the Beijing National Stadium on February 4, 2022. (Elsa/Getty Images)
Newman also competed in two World Championship finals, won gold and bronze at the Commonwealth Games and took bronze at the Pan American Games.
