Mykhailo Mudryk is currently fighting against a 4-year ban from football, but he’s facing a rather uphill battle after testing positive (both samples) last season for a banned substance. He’s not played competitive football since November and unless he can get his sentence reduced on appeal, it’ll be a fair bit longer before he can play again.
While even the most positive outcome probably won’t completely overrule the ban itself, he should be able to get the length down to about 18 months, just as
Paul Pogba had done. For what it’s worth, Mudryk has maintained his innocence all along claiming that he did not knowingly take the substance. (Of course, the rules are very clear about the athlete being responsible for everything that enters their body, knowingly or unknowingly.)
One theory proposed to support that position comes from journalist Igor Burbas in Ukraine, who speculates that the stem cell injection that Mudryk got while on international duty with his country last October was the carrier of the banned substance meldonium.
That sounds a bit too far-fetched, but hey, it’s worth a try.
