{"id":514657,"date":"2022-10-19T05:41:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-19T12:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/?p=514657"},"modified":"2022-10-19T05:41:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T12:41:00","slug":"after-doping-ordeal-roland-schoeman-finding-peace-with-post-swimming-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/after-doping-ordeal-roland-schoeman-finding-peace-with-post-swimming-life\/","title":{"rendered":"After Doping Ordeal, Roland Schoeman Finding Peace with Post-Swimming Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Doping Ordeal, Roland Schoeman Finding Peace with Post-Swimming Life<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roland Schoeman<\/strong> already had the end of his career in sight when the email from FINA pinged into his inbox.<\/p>\n

The South African swimmer had been to four Olympics, missed out on a fifth in 2016 and had his eyes trained on Tokyo in 2020. That changed in July of 2019, when FINA informed him that he had tested positive for a substance Schoeman strenuously maintains he hadn\u2019t used.<\/p>\n

The competition ban, publicly announced in early 2020 but retroactively applied for one year as of May 2019, didn\u2019t prevent Schoeman from vying for Tokyo. But with a pillar of his identity so imperiled by being labeled a cheater, it forced him to confront who he was away from the pool.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy identity really was surrounded by swimming,\u201d Schoeman recently told Swimming World. \u201cI was Roland the swimmer. And when I did well in swimming \u2013 winning gold medals, breaking world records \u2013 everybody loves you. And it\u2019s great when you can feed into that because I wasn\u2019t at a place where I really loved myself and everything about myself, so to be fed externally by all these different stimuli and by winning, it was great.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut as I started to perform less well over time, that lack of identity \u2013 2016, missing the Olympic team, I was really having a dark night of the soul trying to figure out who I was.\u201d<\/p>\n

The doping suspension came just as Schoeman felt closer to achieving balance in and out of the pool. It hastened conversations about what his legacy would be, and after two years grappling with FINA, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Court of Arbitration for Sport to clear his name, he\u2019s come out on the other side with a different view on his career trajectory.<\/p>\n

As Schoeman has turned the page on his career, he\u2019s finding his way outside of the water, working in real estate and as a motivational speaker. The reinvention was at least, in part, in response to a storybook finish that never came.<\/p>\n

The End of Roland the Swimmer<\/h3>\n
Schoeman envisioned a run at a valedictory Olympics in Tokyo as the capper on one of the most distinguished careers in the history of African swimming.<\/p>\n
The 2004 Olympics was the zenith for the sprinter, and it was legendary for the South African program, thanks in large part to Schoeman. He won silver in the 100 freestyle, just .06 behind Pieter van den Hoogenband.<\/strong> He added bronze in the 50 free. And he led off the 400 freestyle in a heroic 48.17 seconds, sending the South Africans to the gold medal<\/a> and world record in 3:13.17.<\/p>\n
By the time Schoeman exited the pool, the South Africans led the field by nearly a second. They were nearly two seconds clear of the U.S., an edge that Lyndon Ferns, Darian Townsend<\/strong> and Ryk Neethling<\/strong> needed to secure a historic medal.<\/p>\n
Schoeman finaled in the 50 free at both the 2008 and 2012 Games, the former in an African record. He continued to collect medals the world over \u2013 four gold and 12 total at the Commonwealth Games, three golds and five total at the World Championships. But he missed out on the 2016 Olympics, then stepped away for 18 months from March 2017 to August 2018 and approached Tokyo qualification at age 40 as a coda.<\/p>\n
Until the failed doping test. An out-of-competition sample collected in May 2019 came back positive for GW501516, or cardarine. Schoeman accepted the adverse analytical finding but argued that it was an inadvertent positive, stemming from contamination in one part of his regimen of 31 supplements. He spent more than $16,000 in testing them for contamination, ultimately unable to find a culprit.<\/p>\n
FINA took into account that outlay of resources, along with a delay of some two months in being notified of his positive test that materially hurt his chances to examine the exact batches he was using, and negative tests collected in March and June of 2019. The doping panel thus ruled<\/a> that Schoeman, \u201con balance of probability,\u201d did not intentionally ingest an illegal substance. Instead of a penalty that could\u2019ve lasted as long as four years, Schoeman accepted a one-year suspension.<\/p>\n
The process Schoeman embarked on in trying to clear his name was difficult and lonely, flying in the face of what he knew to be evidence that reflected poorly on him. It also upended his clean delineation of the world into cheaters and non-cheaters, of angels and demons.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very much a black-and-white person in terms of my beliefs and mindset,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd one thing it really did was reveal to me the inadequacies in my thinking in the way I viewed myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
FINA\u2019s penalty made him eligible for Tokyo, for which he did not qualify. But that wouldn\u2019t be the end of the matter. WADA appealed FINA\u2019s ruling to CAS, which held a hearing in January 2020<\/a>. More than seeking sanction against Schoeman, WADA wanted to prevent FINA\u2019s judgement from being held up as precedent, believing it hinged mostly on a circumstantial case of lack of prior doping offenses. It cited case law that, \u201cprotestations of innocence cannot be given significant weight, and a low amount of substance does not necessarily mean that the use was unintentional.\u201d It sought to stress claims of contamination as being upheld \u201conly in the most exceptional cases,\u201d not viewing Schoeman\u2019s as one.<\/p>\n
The Switzerland-based court waited more than two and a half years to make the results public, with Schoeman finally receiving his final adjudication only this September. The court levied a partial verdict that concurred that Schoeman\u2019s positive test was unintentional, however it ruled that FINA erred in reducing his ban to one year instead of what should\u2019ve been two.<\/p>\n
Receiving the final CAS decision, effective Oct. 12, 2021 and for which Schoeman and his lawyers have lobbied for months, offers closure. He also hopes it\u2019ll set the record straight on the case\u2019s facts.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople can see, hey FINA\u2019s independent arbiters believed it was a contaminated supplement and we were able to prove that, and taking it one step further to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and having three of them find the same thing,\u201d Schoeman said. \u201cIt will go a long way to finally close the door on this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Roland the Real Estate Agent and Motivational Speaker<\/h3>\n
Throughout his career, Schoeman cultivated hobbies and interests outside of swimming, but they remained sidelines. A self-professed \u201cwater baby,\u201d he still swims on a regular basis and in October returned to his first meet since the summer of 2019. He doesn\u2019t see a heavy load of competitions in his future on the Masters circuit. But he remains an accredited coach and is still connected to the sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cSwimming has afforded me so many things: The opportunity to come to the U.S., the opportunity to win a gold medal, to be able to be a resource, so many incredible experiences from it,\u201d Schoeman said. \u201cIn my idea, just to sever that relationship entirely just doesn\u2019t seem right. It\u2019s something that I would never do.\u201d<\/p>\n
With space from the pool, though, he\u2019s gained more bandwidth for new business interests. He\u2019s become a relator in Arizona, and he uses his social media channels<\/a> to weigh in on trends in the market and the larger economy.<\/p>\n
He also works as a motivational speaker, which finds its way onto his social channels. He\u2019s been very open in talking about his past experiences with mental health and trauma, advocating for vulnerability and self-acceptance. They\u2019re all lessons that took a long time for him to learn, and he\u2019s now ready to pass them on to others.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just rounding into my own of finding multiple streams of things I\u2019m truly passionate about,\u201d Schoeman said.<\/p>\n
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A post shared by Roland Schoeman (@roland_schoeman)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n