No, the NCAA and Olympics have not banned athletes from drinking Celsius

Celsius markets its popular energy drinks as products for athletes.

But some recent headlines and online posts claim the NCAA, which regulates collegiate sports across the country, and the Olympics have banned athletes from drinking Celsius because of its ingredients. 

Some of the articles claim that Celsius has at least four ingredients – ginseng, guarana, L-carnitine and taurine – that the NCAA and Olympics have banned.

THE QUESTION

Have the NCAA and Olympics banned athletes from drinking Celsius?

THE SOURCES

• NCAA
• World Anti-Doping Agency 
• U.S. Anti-Doping Agency 
• Celsius
• Banned Substances Control Group, a drug testing service
• United States Olympic Committee Sports Nutrition Team fact sheet on caffeine 
• Caffeine and athletic performance information published in 2018 by multiple sports groups
  

THE ANSWER

No, the NCAA and Olympics have not banned athletes from drinking Celsius. 

WHAT WE FOUND

The NCAA and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the organization that sets rules for the Olympics, don’t have outright bans on any of the ingredients in Celsius. 

The NCAA does have limits on the amount of caffeine that athletes can have in their system at the time of testing but it hasn’t banned products that contain caffeine.  It also hasn’t banned any of the other listed ingredients in Celsius, or those mentioned in the headlines and online posts.

WADA doesn’t have any restrictions on caffeine or the other ingredients in Celsius drinks.

So where do these claims about a Celsius ban stem from? Celsius drinks are made with guarana, a fruit that contains caffeine. Caffeine is included on the NCAA Banned Substances List, with guarana provided as one example.  

But caffeine being included on the list of banned substances doesn’t mean student-athletes cannot drink any caffeinated beverages. 

Instead, the NCAA places a limit on how much caffeine can legally be found in a student-athlete’s urine. The average person would hit the NCAA limit if they consumed about 500 milligrams of caffeine two to three hours before competition, according to multiple groups. 

One can of a regular Celsius energy drink contains 200 milligrams of caffeine. That means someone would need to drink more than two cans of Celsius to hit the NCAA limit.

If a student-athlete were drinking coffee, they would have to have about five cups to hit the NCAA limit in that time window. 

The NCAA did not respond to VERIFY’s request for additional comment.

When we asked the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about claims that athletes were banned from drinking Celsius, they referred us to WADA. We checked WADA’s List of Prohibited Substances and Methods and did not find any of the ingredients in Celsius. 

The agency does have caffeine on its monitoring list, which “means it is not prohibited but WADA is monitoring it in case it becomes an anti-doping issue in the future,” the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency explains on its website.

So, we can VERIFY that neither the NCAA nor the Olympics have banned athletes from drinking Celsius.