The Kerry player served a seven-month ban.
Kerry boss Eamonn Fitzmaurice has spoken to RTÉ Sport to reveal how Brendan O’Sullivan found out he had been banned for testing positive for a banned substance.
Let’s just say that Sport Ireland did not mince their words when informing the player that he was suspended from playing for four years.
The ban would later be suspended, the player having been sidelined for seven months.
“I became aware the same day as Brendan found out, at ten o’clock in the morning on 12 May, 2016. He got the phone call to say he’d failed the test and that he was banned for four years,” revealed Fitzmaurice.
“It was a telephone call from Sport Ireland: ‘Is this Brendan O’Sullivan? You’ve failed a drugs test. You’ve been banned for four years’. That was the conversation – blunt and to the point and, as you can imagine for him, pretty shocking.”
Fitzmaurice explained why Kerry GAA was so tight-lipped about protecting O’Sullivan.
“If we were released a statement to say that Brendan O’Sullivan had failed a drugs test and was banned for four years, conclusions were going to be jumped to. We had to protect Brendan, particularly when it was inadvertent.
“We had to go through the process and that’s what I found most frustrating – the length of time it took to get from start to finish.
“He got the phone call on 12 May, 2016 and by the time the process was eventually finished it was 1 June 2017.”
O’Sullivan’s four-year ban had been suspended after it was found that his supplement had been contaminated with methylhexaneamine, and he was eventually told that he had served his ban in its totality.
“We had a statement ready to release to the public as soon as the process was finished to inform them what had happened, then Brendan got a call on 21 December at half five in the evening to say ‘you have been suspended for seven months and happy Christmas’.”
