Laura Muir’s former coach Andrew Young banned for three years

Olympic silver medallist Laura Muir has said she has put a “difficult chapter firmly behind” her after her former coach Andrew Young was banned for three years for “serious misconduct”.

A UK Athletics disciplinary panel found that Young – who Scotland’s Muir stopped working with in 2023 – “ignored medical advice” and “used manipulative and coercive behaviour towards those he coached”.

One incident highlighted was when Young, “following a disagreement, drove at speed with an athlete in his car before abandoning them at the roadside, disregarding their safety and wellbeing”.

Other examples included “requiring an athlete to compete against the clear advice of a physiotherapist, threatening to exclude athletes from training or races if they did not comply with his demands, and emotionally undermining those who raised concerns about injuries”.

Young faced 39 charges and, in September 2024, a UKA disciplinary panel found nine of those proven “wholly or in part”, with seven of them serious.

He was then suspended for five years in a ban backdated to April 2023.

Young appealed against the ruling and, while an independent panel expressed “a slightly lesser view of the gravity of the misconduct overall” in August 2025 and reduced his ban to three years, “it rejected claims of bias, legal error and unfairness, and it confirmed the misconduct findings in full”.

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