Georgia Griffith stands to be awarded her first ever major global medal with the Australian middle-distance runner poised to be belatedly handed a World Indoor Championship bronze following a doping violation by an Ethiopian rival.
Diribe Welteji took the silver at last year's global event in Nanjing but she's going to be stripped of it after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled on Thursday the 23-year-old should be banned until the middle of next year for an anti-doping rules infraction.
Welteji had been given a two-year suspension after failing to provide a doping sample in February 2025, with the court also ruling all her competitive results since that time should be disqualified, including the 1500m silver she won at the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China, in March last year.
If normal procedures are followed, her disqualification would mean Britain's bronze medallist Georgia Hunter Bell upgraded to the silver, while Griffith, who had set an Australian and Oceanian indoor record with her 4min 00.80sec run, would move up from fourth to take the bronze.
The gold had been won by Welteji's Ethiopian colleague Gudaf Tsegay, who set a championship record 3:54.86 in a comfortable victory.
Griffith's medal would be a belated reward in a distinguished, battling career, with the previous biggest medal for the Canberra-born 29-year-old having been the silver she won as a student at the World University Games in Naples back in 2019.
That, however, doesn't compare to a podium place in a global senior championships. Her previous best effort had been making the final of the 2022 World Championships outdoors in Oregon, when she finished ninth.
It will be a morale booster too before Griffith seeks to defend her Australia 3000m title in the Hobart Track Classic on Saturday.
Welteji, who also won silver at the 1500m at the 2023 outdoor world championships, had been provisionally suspended in September, causing her to miss last year's world championships in Tokyo.
But the Ethiopian national anti-doping body found that Welteji had not violated any anti-doping rules, only for World Athletics to appeal to the sport's highest body CAS, seeking a four-year suspension.
CAS partially upheld World Athletics' appeal on Thursday, saying Welteji would be suspended for two years after an arbitrator decided she had "failed to establish any compelling justification for her failure to submit to sample collection" while also accepting "that her failure was not intentional."
Welteji, a familiar foe for top Australian middle distance star Jess Hull, has had her suspension backdated to begin on July 8, 2025, and it ends on June 30 next year, meaning she'll be able to compete in the 2027 World Athletics Championships in Beijing in September.
