Former world heavyweight champion Joseph Parker has denied taking “any prohibited substance” after testing positive for cocaine.<\/p>\n
The 33-year-old New Zealander was tested by the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association (Vada) on 25 October.<\/p>\n
On the same day, he was beaten by Britain’s Fabio Wardley at London’s O2 Arena.<\/p>\n
Sources have confirmed to BBC Sport that Parker tested positive for the recreational drug, and not performance-enhancing drugs, while his promoted confirmed there had been an “adverse finding” on Friday.<\/p>\n
“Before my recent fight, I took a voluntary test and have now been informed that it returned an adverse result,” Parker wrote on his Instagram account.<\/p>\n
“This came as a real surprise to me.<\/p>\n
“I did not take any prohibited substance, I do not use performance-enhancing drugs and do not support their use.<\/p>\n
“I am co-operating fully with the process now under way, and I am confident the investigation will clear my name.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former world heavyweight champion Joseph Parker has denied taking “any prohibited substance” after testing positive for cocaine. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-140958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}