The Ajax and Cameroon goalkeeper on the mistake that led to a doping suspension and took his career to the edge of collapse
André Onana had a headache. He had landed in the small hours on a flight back from Bergamo where Ajax had drawn 2-2 with Atalanta and didn’t sleep much. When he woke, his head still hurt. Training wasn’t for a few hours, so rather than wait until he arrived at De Toekomst, Ajax’s training base, he took a paracetamol from the medicine box in the kitchen and got on with it. After the session he was called to another routine drugs test, his third in a week. He didn’t think anything of it. Not then, anyway. He could be forgiven for thinking of nothing else since.
“Football is not a game of humanity,” Onana says. He has been talking for over an hour and it is the only thing he says in English. He speaks without melodrama or rancour and with a dignity – an acceptance, even – that is disconcerting. It is also partly practised; an exercise in exigency, in self-control and survival. It was October 2020 and it could have been the end. Two days later the analysis arrived, the goalkeeper informed when he was with Cameroon: he had tested positive, one of very few footballers found guilty of doping.