The sports world can't agree on weed and athletes pay for it

The first Olympic gold medal ever awarded for snowboarding was also the first Olympic medal ever stripped due to a failed cannabis drug test.

Ross Rebagliati was 26 years old when he represented Canada at the 1998 Nagano Olympics in Japan. Those games saw the return of curling, the expansion of hockey to include women, and the addition of snowboarding, with both men’s and women’s giant slalom and halfpipe events.

Faster than Italy’s Thomas Pruger by 2 milliseconds, Rebagliati won gold. Three days later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rescinded the medal after his urine tested positive for cannabis. The Canadian Olympic Association appealed, but in the meantime, the Japanese police intervened. “They put me in jail in Japan,” says Rebagliati. “The only reason I got out was because I got my medal back.”

The appeals board ruled in his favor, thanks to a quirk — the IOC had never actually banned cannabis. They rectified that oversight very quickly, banning cannabis and enshrining the snowboarder’s legacy in what has been called the “Ross Rebagliati Rule”.

Almost 30 years later, the drug’s place in society and sports has changed. Athletes in the MLB, NBA, NHL and NCAA are free to consume cannabis. In 2024, the NFL more than doubled its threshold for a positive test. That same year, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency called the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) decision to maintain its cannabis prohibition disappointing.

But at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympics, athletes could still pull a Rebagliati and lose a medal for consuming cannabis. Granted, it’s a bit more difficult now. In 2013, WADA raised the level for a positive urine cannabis test tenfold, from 15 ng/mL to 150 ng/mL, in a move meant to prevent use only during competition. Both athletes and scientists questioned why cannabis was still being regulated at all, and when WADA removed cannabidiol (CBD) from its Prohibited List in 2018, confusion only grew.

Why spend resources policing a substance that is rapidly becoming legalized and normalized around the world? Why does WADA care so much about weed?

How are athletes tested for THC?

Leading up to the Olympics, Rebagliati was plagued by anxiety. “For four years, I was like, ‘f**k, I hope I don't test positive for weed’,” he says. When he got the bad news days after winning gold, he was simply honest. “For me, it was all about coming clean. Like, yeah, I smoked weed. We didn't know how long we had to quit it for, but I didn't smoke weed since the spring,” he recounts. “But I was around all my friends all summer and all fall, and that's how I probably tested positive.”

Athletes are screened for Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) using urine immunoassays that typically look a bit like pregnancy or COVID-19 lateral flow tests. They’re covered in antibodies that bind carboxy-THC, one of the main metabolites of THC. As pee migrates up the test, any carboxy-THC present will bind to the antibodies, kicking out the molecules responsible for the red line’s colour. If there’s enough, it will occupy all of the binding sites on the antibodies — no line means a positive test. Positive pee will then be sent off for confirmatory testing.

“Let's say you take a cannabis break, because you have a competition coming up. When do you stop using? I don’t know. Are you going to test positive if you haven't used in two weeks? I don't know,” says Dr. Joanna Zeiger, an Olympic triathlete who competed at the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia and has a PhD in epidemiology. She founded the Canna Research Foundation to support unbiased research into cannabis.

THC is a lipophilic molecule, meaning that it accumulates in fatty tissue and is broken down slowly over time. The amount of time depends on many highly individualized factors that are not yet entirely understood. Higher fat levels are known to increase retention time, but the effects of other things like diet, consumption method, hydration, age and exercise are still unclear.

In one study, 60 cannabis users went abstinent and stayed in a closed research unit with 24/7 monitoring, having all of their urine analyzed, for up to 30 days. Based only on their initial urine test, researchers separated them into high, medium and low groups.

People in the low group took an average of 5 days to test negative, but there was a huge variation, from 0 to 22 days. For the medium cohort, it took an average of 10 days but as long as 25, and for the high division, it took up to 30 days, with an average of 15. To further complicate the matter, nearly every participant tested positive at least once after having tested negative, with some going up to 28 days between their first negative and last positive drug tests.

How the dose of cannabis consumed translates to the concentration of carboxy-THC in urine is still being studied and understood as well. As cannabis is a so-called threshold drug, “you're allowed to use it up to a certain threshold. But the problem with that is, how much do you need to take to reach that threshold?” says Zeiger.

WADA states that “the high level of cannabis required to trigger an Adverse Analytical Finding in competition today would be consistent with a significantly impaired athlete or a frequent user.”

In that study, the higher the initial urine concentration of carboxy-THC, the longer it took to clear the body; however, that initial concentration did not depend on how much cannabis participants used. Some people smoked multiple joints a day and tested into the low group. Others smoked far less and had high levels.

A similar study on 70 cannabis users found an average detection window of 10 days, but after 28 days, 12 participants were still testing positive. It also featured several people who smoked relatively little but showed high carboxy-THC values, and vice-versa. 

As for Rebagliati’s story of second-hand smoke? Studies show that it is definitely possible, particularly since a lot of the smoking occurred in the closed environment of a gondola. “We didn't really know that we could actually test positive for secondhand smoke, it wasn't common knowledge,” he recounts. “I remember lots of times people saying, ‘doesn't it bug you that you can't smoke weed?’ and I was like, ‘actually, I'm fine with it, but I feel stoned around you guys,’ but that's because I was getting stoned.”

With the chances of testing positive in competition being what they are, what’s so worth it about weed that athletes are willing to assume the risk?

Why do athletes use cannabis in the first place?

Some athletes use cannabis medicinally, whether by prescription or informally.

After a bike accident left Zeiger with severe pain, she sought options for relief other than opioids. “I had tried things like nerve blocks and nerve ablations, … but even with interventions, I still had a lot of pain,” she explains. Her husband encouraged her to try cannabis. “I just was very ashamed,” she says. “Cannabis wasn't really legal yet, and I actually was a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studying cannabis use in adolescents and young adults. That's certainly not a population you want using cannabis, and so it was seen in a very negative light, both in my research world and in my athletic world.”

But it worked. “To this day, I'm still playing around with proper dosing and cannabinoid ratios and other kinds of things, but it's really helped me physically in terms of being able to get back a quality of life,” says Zeiger. “One of the things I say about cannabis is that it may not reduce your pain, but it reduces your suffering.”

Some athletes use cannabis as a sleep or appetite aid. Both are important for training and performance, and both are disrupted by the constant travel many athletes undertake.

“It's especially great for symptoms of jet lag, where you're eating dinner, but it's breakfast time,” says Rebagliati. “As an athlete, it is so important to keep an even keel, as far as your calories and intake and all that. And so I found the munchies, as they they call it, really helped me to remind myself to eat.”

Or for handling both the stress and tedium of training.

“In the off-season I would use cannabis before I would go to the gym,” Rebagliati shares. “I would do a couple of bong hits, and then rip down to the gym and do my workout.” He says that cannabis helped with the monotony of training and some of the pressures of being a professional athlete. “It's hard enough to go to the gym on a regular basis as it is. And then you throw in you're not earning a lot of money as a Canadian athlete,” says Rebagliati. “The weed really helps you focus in on what the task is at hand.”

And of course, some athletes are using cannabis purely recreationally, as an alternative to alcohol, or just as a preference.

In the eyes of Dr. Liz Thompson, who studies the endocannabinoid system’s effects in athletes, , this issue is far bigger than one drug’s prohibition – “It's not just about cannabis, it's also about the autonomy of the athlete.”

“The question really becomes, why are we punishing them fortrying to reduce harm?” she asks. “It's not about performance enhancement ... they're reducing harm from medications they don't want to use and are terrified of, they're reducing harm from alcohol.” 

Former NBA player Larry Sanders is one such athlete. He turned to cannabis as an alternative to conventional pharmaceuticals when it was still banned in the league, and was suspended for drug policy violations twice. "I could feel the effects it was having on my body, on my sleep and pain in comparison to the pills I was given,” he told CBS. “There are other risks bigger than a fine, like reconstructing my brain chemistry by taking a pill. I understood the stigma.” Retired NFL defensive end Marvin Washington advocates for cannabis products over opiates, and former NBA power forward Al Harrington turned to it for long-term recovery and maintenance.

According to WADA, cannabis is eligible for a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE). “I tried to get one. I was turned down,” says Zeiger. 

As cannabis gains both cultural acceptance and therapeutic uses, why does WADA continue to ban its use in competition?

Does using cannabis violate the 'Spirit of Sport'

WADA considers putting a substance or method on the Prohibited List if it meets two of three criteria:

1. It “has the potential to enhance or enhances sport performance”
2. It “represents an actual or potential health risk to the Athlete”
3. It “violates the spirit of sport”

The first two criteria are straightforward, if challenging. Scientific consensus can be hard to reach, although establishing only the “potential” for something to enhance or harm athletes is easier. “I think what the problem is, is spirit of sport,” says Thompson.

Spirit of sport isn’t defined in the WADA Code so much as evoked, with themes of respect, honesty and health. Terms like ‘the intrinsic value of sport’ and ‘ethical pursuit of human excellence’ abound.

“The spirit of sport is one that's caused a lot of arguments,” Thompson says. “[That] is really where you can get almost anything, because you just need two of the three.” 

Regarding the potential of cannabis as an ergogenic substance (the scientific term for performance improving) — “Cannabinoids don’t enhance performance!!” writes Dr. Michael Kennedy, who researches clinical pharmacology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “It seems that there is general, but not total, acceptance by the sporting community that cannabis will not enhance performance.” 

Thompson (“We haven't had anything show that it's enhancing ever”) and Zeiger (“it's not an ergogenic aid.”) agree. So does WADA. They lean on safety as the reason for cannabis prohibition. In 2022, they undertook a scientific review of cannabis’ status. They elected to keep it on the Prohibited List, citing the risk of THC to neurological health, particularly in young people, and spirit of sport.

“With spirit of sport, it could be argued that that's just them playing moral police,” says Thompson. “They're looking at it, and they're saying, ‘this is okay’, and ‘this isn't okay’, and alcohol is a perfect example.”

Alcohol is similarly dangerous to health, particularly neurological, in young people. Like cannabis, it is illegal in some WADA signatory countries, legal in others. As with cannabis, intoxication during sports would be dangerous. Yet alcohol is not banned or even monitored like substances including nicotine, codeine, semaglutide (Ozempic) and phenylephrine (Sudafed).

Rebagliati also believes alcohol represents a double standard – “There's a whole athletes village beer garden ... they're literally doing alcohol advertising and the athletes get free drinks, and they're promoting alcohol,” he says. “So why not promote cannabis for those athletes that are allowed to use it?”

According to the IOC, there are no longer athlete beer gardens. “For more than 20 years, the Olympic Village has followed a consistent policy – the Organising Committee does not sell alcohol in the Villages,” said a representative for the IOC. The Olympics do, however, have an official beer sponsor: Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Why don't we know more about how cannabis affect athletes?

Until relatively recently, studying cannabis in an unbiased way has been difficult, if not impossible. “I always like to joke around when you're looking at the negative aspects of cannabis, you're doing marijuana research, and when you're looking at it in a more neutral way, it's cannabis research,” quips Zeiger.

In the past, funding was largely only available for so-called marijuana research, and even it was sparse, says Thompson. “We're getting better, for sure, but the policies that were put in place over the last probably 80 years have stifled research.”

The legalization of cannabis in places like Canada, Germany and 24 American states is enabling high-quality research into what exactly cannabis does in the body, how, and how it could be used therapeutically. In 2022, the NFL announced $1 million in funding for research into CBD’s effects on elite athletes. Some of that money went to the lab at the University of Regina, where Thompson was doing her PhD.

The researchers ultimately wanted to investigate the effects of CBD on neuroinflammation. But first, they did a study just to see how CBD is processed in an athletic body, “because we don't even have that right now. We do not have that in a healthy population at all. We have it in epileptic patients. Well, the rest of the world's not epileptic patients,” Thompson explains.

Now, they are investigating whether using CBD throughout a season can protect the brains of contact-sport athletes. “In the literature, you can see that if you have enough cannabinoids on board to begin with, it can reduce your propensity for the neuroinflammation,” explains Thompson. “[Contact-sport athletes] are a good population to study because we can put the molecules on board first, then watch them smash each other, and then we can compare the differences between the ones that had some cannabinoid molecules on board and ones that didn't.”

The team will soon run a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial with college-level football and hockey players during the season. “We hypothesize that the athletes that are taking the formulation will show less neuroinflammation and less concussions or concussion symptoms and less pain versus when they are taking placebo,” Thompson says. The researchers are collecting a lot of athlete health metrics - everything from cerebrovascular blood flow to gut microbiome composition and sleep scores - in what will be “the most complete physiological pictures ever collected on cannabinoids in elite athletes,” says Thompson.

The NFL and NFLPA awarded another round of funding in 2023, this time just over $500,000 to fund research into CBD’s potential for pain management. 

Reefer reality 

When he got busted in 1998, Rebagliati says he chose to see the platform given to him as an opportunity to “go down in a blazing ball of fire supporting cannabis.”

“I was smashing the stereotype of what a cannabis user was supposed to be like,” he says. “How is it that I was able to get myself to the Olympics, be organized, not lose my passport?” For him, it was a chance to start conversations. “It was all about sticking up for my friends and everybody in the world that smokes weed, and how can I help change the narrative around cannabis.”

Nearly three decades later, in 2024, WADA identified 145 ‘Adverse Analytical Findings’ (aka failed tests) due to cannabinoids. They accounted for 5 percent of all failures that year. With 266,962 samples tested, that’s a discovery rate of roughly 1 in 2000. For reference, about 2900 athletes competed at the Milano-Cortina Olympic Games.

Things have changed for cannabis in sport, but have they changed enough?

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