T&T's sprint­er Se­moy Hack­ett test­ed pos­i­tive for a banned stim­u­lant. The Lon­don Olympics women's 200m fi­nal­ist re­turned the pos­i­tive test for Methyl­hexa­m­eamine dur­ing the NCAA Di­vi­sion 1 Out­door Track and Field Cham­pi­onships in June and has been banned by the NCAA.

The pos­i­tive find­ing is the sec­ond for the To­ba­go sprint­er in less than a year af­ter she re­turned a sim­i­lar pos­i­tive re­sult for the same sub­stance at last year's Na­tion­al Cham­pi­onships and was banned for six months (Oc­to­ber 2011 to March 2012).

Methyl­hexa­m­eamine, is a stim­u­lant that was iden­ti­fied on the NCAA's pub­lished list of banned sub­stances be­gin­ning in the 2011-12 ath­let­ic sea­son. As a re­sult of the pos­i­tive find­ing, Hack­ett's Louisana State Uni­ver­si­ty team will lose the Women's team ti­tle won at this year's NCAA Cham­pi­onships.

The find­ings were pub­lished in a re­lease on LSU's Web site on Fri­day evening. The re­lease quot­ed Hack­ett as say­ing she is sor­ry and it was not in­ten­tion­al."I want to ex­press my apolo­gies to my coach­es, my team­mates, LSU and our fans. Al­though this was un­in­ten­tion­al, I'm deeply sor­ry this will have such a neg­a­tive im­pact on my team and LSU."

Her team will now have to re­turn all the tro­phies and awards won at the Cham­pi­onships. LSU's head coach Den­nis Shaver de­scribed the news as dis­ap­point­ing. "It's un­for­tu­nate the team will be re­quired to va­cate the NCAA Cham­pi­onship be­cause of the ac­tions of one in­di­vid­ual, but we will cer­tain­ly com­ply� with the NCAA's in­struc­tions in this mat­ter. We sup­port the poli­cies that the NCAA has set to pro­mote fair com­pe­ti­tion. "This is dis­ap­point­ing news for the LSU Track and Field pro­gramme, but our hard work and pur­suit of ex­cel­lence will con­tin­ue on and off the track."

Shaver coached T&T 100m na­tion­al record hold­ers 2008 Olympic dou­ble sil­ver Richard Thomp­son and reign­ing World Cham­pi­onships women's 100m bronze medal­list Kel­ly-Ann Bap­tiste. Thomp­son and Bap­tiste were 100m fi­nal­ists at the Lon­don Olympics.

When in­formed Sports Min­is­ter Anil Roberts ex­pressed shock and dis­may at the news. Roberts was at the CFU Caribbean Cup qual­i­fiers in Ba­co­let, To­ba­go, to wit­ness T&T beat Suri­name 3-0. Trinidad Guardian made sev­er­al at­tempts to con­tact NAAA Pres­i­dent Ephraim Ser­rette but was un­suc­cess­ful as calls to his cell phone went unan­swered. Voice mes­sages were al­so left.

Hack­ett, 23, be­came the first lo­cal woman to qual­i­fy for an Olympic 200m fi­nal where she fin­ished eighth in Lon­don in a time of 22.87 sec­onds on Au­gust 7. In the semi­fi­nals she equalled her na­tion­al record of 22.55. The two-time NCAA Di­vi­sion II dou­ble sprint cham­pi­on was a semi­fi­nal­ist in the 100m four days ear­li­er and set a per­son­al best of 11.04 in the heats. Hack­ett was al­so a mem­ber of T&T's women's 4x100m which ad­vanced to the fi­nal, clock­ing a na­tion­al record of 42.31 in the heats. In the fi­nal, the team failed to fin­ish.

At the Sagi­cor/NGC­Na­tion­al Open Cham­pi­onships on June 23 and 24 at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Port-of-Spain, Hack­ett was sec­ond in the women's 100m (11.14) and 200m (22.98). With her pos­i­tive test all her clock­ings and per­for­mances at the NCAA Cham­pi­onships, the Na­tion­al Cham­pi­onships and the Olympic Games could be an­nulled.