Many athletes who’ve failed a test for performance-enhancing drugs have trotted out some pretty dubious excuses to explain that development. That includes Ysaora Thibus, a French fencer who was apparently telling the truth after blaming kissing for a doping violation that threatened to derail her career.

It’s been close to a century since the International Amateur Athletic Federation (now known as “World Athletics”) became the first governing body to officially outlaw the use of performance-enhancing substances when it banned track-and-field athletes from harnessing stimulants in competitions.

That marked the start of the first concerted crackdown on the practice that is widely known as “doping,” as the International Olympic Committee started targeting illicit practices designed to give competitors an unfair edge in the subsequent decade as part of the cat-and-mouse game that continues to unfold almost 100 years later.

Virtually every sport has been forced to grapple with a doping scandal stemming from athletes who used steroids, HGH, or one of the many banned substances on the constantly evolving list of illegal supplements that offer an unsanctioned physiological boost.

Lance Armstrong, Mark McGwire, and Ben Johnson are just some of the notable names who saw their reputation tarnished by PEDs, but there are also some people who’ve seemingly been caught red-handed after testing positive for a substance they didn’t actually know they’d ingested.

That list now includes Ysaora Thibus, a fencer and three-time Olympian who won a silver medal while representing France at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021.

In 2024, the 33-year-old found herself facing a four-year ban after testing positive for ostarine, a WADA-banned substance that can foster bone growth and muscle development, during a screening the International Testing Agency conducted while she was competing in the Challenge International de Paris in January.

Thibus had the chance to plead her case at a hearing that was held in Switzerland earlier this year, and according to The Athletic, she asserted she had not consumed ostarine but was rather exposed to it by a former romantic partner who’d taken it without her knowledge by repeatedly kissing them “over a period of nine days.”

The panel tasked with reviewing the evidence determined the story was legit, saying they were able to confirm the partner in question had begun taking the substance at the start of 2024 and noting there was a “sufficient amount of ostarine in the saliva to contaminate a person through kissing.”

You may be surprised to learn this is not the first time the “kissing defense” has been used to successfully exonerate someone who ended up in a similar situation; in 2009, French tennis player Richard Gasquet skirted a positive cocaine test after placing the blame on a woman he made out with while partying at a nightclub in Miami.

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