Controversial Olympic show jumping individual gold medalist and former Canadian chef d’equipe Eric Lamaze has been suspended until September 2031, following a decision from the Court of Arbitration for Sport in his human anti-doping case.
Eric Lamaze during his Olympic victory gallop on Hickstead in 2008. (Photo © by Nancy Jaffer)
In March 2022, Lamaze received a formal notice of an FEI disciplinary charge for “evading, refusing or failing to submit to sample collection by an athlete” in June 2021 in Valkensward, Netherlands, in connection with the FEI human athlete anti-doping rules.
While CAS proceedings continued, Lamaze submitted forged medical documents stating he suffered from brain cancer, which led to a four-year ineligibility period imposed by the FEI, starting in September 2023.
The CAS panel in turn found Lamaze guilty of the anti-doping rule violation and imposed an ineligibility period of four years, beginning in 2027 and consecutive from the end of the FEI suspension. Lamaze was fined 15,000 Swiss francs ($16,424), and ordered to pay the costs of the arbitration proceedings as well as 12,000 Swiss francs ($13,139) to the FEI as a contribution towards the legal fees. Lamaze was disqualified from all of his results at FEI competitions from June 5, 2021 to March 30, 2022.
It was far from his first dramatic brush with the rules. Lamaze was banned from the sport for life after missing both the 1996 and 2000 Olympics when he tested positive for cocaine metabolites. But the ban was reversed in September 2000 by an adjudicator who said cited “exceptional circumstances.”
Lamaze’s fortunes soared at the 2008 Olympics, where his performance on Hickstead earned him individual gold and team silver, the high point of his roller coaster career. But another low came in 2011, after he finished his round on Hickstead at the Verona, Italy, show, when the horse walked out of the ring and dropped dead with a ruptured aorta. Weeks later, Hickstead was mourned at the Royal Winter Fair horse show in Toronto, where people wore armbands in the horse’s memory.
Lamaze, 56, who announced his retirement from competition in 2022, has been the defendant in several lawsuits involving horse sales.