Gold medal stripped from Puerto Rico men’s bowling team at Pan Am Games after Jean Pérez Faure’s positive doping test

The 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, Peru are wrapping up, but they provided a surprising story Sunday thanks to a doping infraction…in bowling. As per a press release sent out by PanAm Sports (the organizing body for those games), Puerto Rico’s Jean Pérez Faure failed a doping test. Pérez Faure competed in the men’s doubles event and won gold there, but he and his teammate were stripped of their medals thanks to that test, moving the U.S. team of Jakob Butturff and Nick Pate into first place. Here’s more from that release:

Committed to the fight against doping in sport, Panam Sports informs the public that as of today, August 11, 2019, a new case of doping has been detected. The athlete in question is Jean Perez Faure of Puerto Rico who competed in the Bowling competition in the Men’s Doubles event. The doping control test was positive for Chlorthalidone, belonging to the S5 group of diuretics and other masking agents.

As a result, the Disciplinary Commission of the Lima 2019 Pan American Games has annulled the result of this competition, where Puerto Rico had won the gold medal.

For this reason, the results are as follows:

Gold Medal, United States
Silver Medal, Colombia
Bronze Medal, Mexico

It’s not every day we see a doping story in bowling at all, let alone one that changes a medal result. But it’s certainly possible that banned substances could have an effect in bowling, and while Pérez Faure’s test was only for a masking agent rather than a performance-enhancing substance, those masking agents are banned because they can be used to cover up traces of other banned substances. At any rate, this led to a gold for Butturf and Pate, albeit after the fact.

[USA Today; photo of Pérez Faure from Peru’s El Bocón]