Doping in Sport - Bi-Weekly Press round-up #116
A UCI investigator talks motor doping in cycling, the Tour de France winner Tadej Pogacar is encouraged to make guarantees he is 'clean' and a study finds 33% of sports supplements are contaminated.
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Every Monday and Thursday, I send a newsletter to your inbox with the URLs to all the major doping stories in the press over the past seven days.
In case you missed it on Tuesday, I published an article on the Royal Spanish Cycling Federation’s decision to employ two former riders, including Alejandro Valverde, who were both implicated in the Operación Puerto blood doping scandal. “The investigating taskforce considers that it can be assumed that the delivery of the ‘orange juice’ mentioned by FUENTES could have been made then,” (link).
RTBF Actus published a Long Read on the normalisation of ketone use and carbon monoxide inhalation in professional cycling titled ‘When we flirt with the borders of doping’. “Some teams have admitted that before races, on the buses, riders could help themselves to anti-inflammatories, painkillers, or caffeine-laced products. These medications are not banned by WADA. A cocktail-like mixture of these products is even known internally as ‘la bomba’,” (link). In 2020, I revealed in The Mail on Sunday that UK Sport secretly supplied British Olympians with ketones, which were unavailable to other nations at the time, prior to London 2012 (link).