Bad blood

IT’S BEEN YEARS SINCE THE LAST BIG DOPING SCANDAL, SO IS THE SPORT STILL RIDDLED WITH DRUGS? WE TRY TO DISCOVER THE TRUTH

-  James Witts

It’s been 12 years since Lance Armstrong confided to Oprah Winfrey that his seven Tour de France titles were a lie. Those wins came between 1999 and 2005, the first just 12 months after the Festina Affair, where doping products were found in a soigneur’s car en route to the Tour’s Grand Départ in Ireland. Both episodes shook the sport. You then have Operación Puerto, the Spanish police operation against the sports doping network of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, which came to light in May 2006. That was nearly 20 years ago. Since then, there have been ‘lesser scandals’ such as Operation Aderlass (from 2019) and the ongoing Operation Ilex led by the Spanish authorities, but in both cases there was no suggestion that the riders at the WorldTour top table were implicated. It begs two questions - is the sport cleaner than ever, and, if perceived as not, where are the gaps in the anti-doping system?

“No evidence uncovered”

Rob Parisotto is an Australian stem-cell scientist who pioneered the first test for EPO (the blood-booster erythropoietin) and the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP). We'll come back to both EPO and the ABP shortly, but what's Parisotto’s macro view of the current ‘healthy’ situation?

“It's difficult to believe one way or another that exceptional performances are ‘clean’ as a result of freak physical prowess, or artificially enhanced,” he says. “On the one hand, there have been performances that are unbelievable; on the other hand, no evidence of cheating has been uncovered.”