Fighting doping charge was lonely - Wright

Chris Wright is in the final year of his contract with Leicestershire

Veteran seam bowler Chris Wright says he is determined to repay Leicestershire for supporting him during the "tough and lonely" months he spent trying to defend himself after failing a drugs test.

The 39-year-old was given a backdated nine-month ban in July 2024 after he tested positive for ostarine - a drug which has similar effects to testosterone - in September the previous year.

He admitted two charges of breaching England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) anti-doping rules on the basis he had taken the banned substance "inadvertently and unknowingly" because it was contained in a bilberry food supplement which he had bought online.

Wright calls himself a "bit of a geek" for the way he keeps track of things, and had samples of the supplement tested in a laboratory in France.

Those results were part of the case he put in front of a National Anti-Doping Panel, which decided that "while his fault was not significant, it was not trifling".

He maintains that the ban handed down "felt extremely harsh" but is satisfied that he proved he breached doping rules because the supplement "was clearly contaminated".

"The sad thing is that it doesn't matter," Wright told BBC Radio Leicester.

"I could prove to everyone who cared that I'm not a cheat and that this was obviously an accident. But you still have to go through that horrible process.

"It was tough and lonely, and no-one could know, so I had to keep it quiet."

While trying to defend himself and come to terms with what a lengthy ban could mean to his future in the game when he was just months into his latest two-year deal with Leicestershire, Wright says he was forced to think about getting a "Plan B up his sleeve".

And so he started a podcast.

"I love the game and I'd love to be a coach in the future, but if I had got a ban that was particularly severe and I hadn't been able to locate the source of the contamination, then I wouldn't be able to do that," Wright said.

"So that was hard, having to think that I can't do the thing I think I want to do when I finish playing cricket. And to be fair, releasing a podcast about bowling was born out of that really.

"The difficult part was not being able to talk about it [the doping ban]."

Wright says he is thankful for how Leicestershire also kept "radio silence" about the unavailability of their leading County Championship wicket-taker of 2023.

The former Middlesex and Warwickshire bowler, who has claimed 788 career wickets across all formats in two decades of professional cricket, returned in time to see out the final two months of last season.

"I appreciate they got so many questions, where is Chris Wright, why isn't he here, why aren't they saying anything? The answer is because they couldn't," he said. "It was for me that they were doing that.

"They didn't want to say anything that would jeopardise the case because we wanted the best result possible."

Wright said the level of support and understand he got at the time was "fantastic".

"I'm pretty sure there are a lot of other clubs that would have just cut ties much earlier and they would probably have been in their rights," he said.

"I appreciate them being patient with me, but hopefully I can reward them this year.

"Now I've had a good pre-season so I hope I can pick up where I left off in 2023."