Disgraced runner Zane Robertson -‘there’s no coming back from this’

New Zealand athlete Zane Robertson.
Photo: PHOTOSPORT

Disgraced distance runner Zane Robertson has explained he was in a dark place and weighed down by financial and personal issues when he decided to drug cheat.

The Commonwealth Games bronze medallist was banned for eight years yesterday for taking the blood booster EPO and providing false documentation as he went to extraordinary lengths to try and prove his innocence.

Robertson, 33, who’s based in Kenya, has told the ‘Runners Only’ podcast it took him many years to get to the point where he decided to dope.

“It’s not just one particular reason. I hate it so much and it’s just a one-off hit, and I got caught. It’s been building on me a few years.”

“(The) frustration and anger at the sport itself. In any elite sport I believe the top is not a level playing field like they say.

“I started to ask myself this question: ‘Why do people like myself always have to be the ones to lose or suffer’, and in the end lose our contracts, lose our income, lose our race winnings and eventually end up not having the ability to have a family or live anywhere else in the world in the predicaments we’re in,” he said.

Photo: Andrew Cornaga / www.photosport.co.nz

“The other reason, especially after the Covid era, prizemoney in races went down. Contracts were almost dropped as well. After the Olympics I was told by one of my companies ‘we thought you would run better’, and immediate exit from the deal.

“The other company was holding on for the bare minimum and I had pressure from my management. I was constantly getting injured in the race shoes I was trying to develop. Nothing was seeming to go my way.”

Robertson tested positive for Erythropoietin (EPO) at a race in Manchester in May last year and said he had known the ban was coming since September.

Robertson said financial pressure living in New Zealand and a “nasty” divorce was also a factor.

“I made some bad decisions in a really dark place.”

He maintains he only took EPO once and that he falsified documents in a bid to save a 16 year running career.

“I was getting my arse handed to me in every race and I just kept asking ‘how is this possible?'”

“To me four years is the same as eight. There is no coming back from this.”

Robertson said he can’t afford to move back to New Zealand but is appreciative of the support he has been getting, although his brother Jake is “a little bit pissed off with me”.

“That was the worst thing for me because I knew it wouldn’t just be affecting me. It will affect him and my sister-in-law, his wife, because they are both athletes and I don’t know how to help.”

Robertson said it was “horrible” that his brother should be seen as guilty by association, which was not the case.

-RNZ