Pep Guardiola's doping case revisited
In 2001, Pep Guardiola and Frank de Boer tested positive for the same drug while being supervised by the same FC Barcelona doctor. It took eight years before Guardiola could fully clear his name.
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In the autumn of 2001, after a Serie A match versus Piacenza, a doping control officer shepherded the Brescia Calcio footballer Pep Guardiola through the corridors of the Stadio Leonardo Garilli to a designated drug testing room, and asked the player to submit a urine sample.
The results of the analysis performed on that sample, sent to Guardiola weeks later by Italian anti-doping authorities, marked the beginning of the future FC Barcelona manager’s eight-year, but ultimately successful battle to salvage both his and his beloved Catalan club’s reputation.
Six months earlier, the Barcelona defender Frank de Boer had tested positive for metabolites of the anabolic steroid nandrolone after a UEFA cup quarter-final tie versus Celta Vigo. Guardiola, in his eleventh first-team season with the club, also took to the field in that match and played in central midfield behind the Brazilian legend Rivaldo, who scored twice.
De Boer was initially banned for one year, until an appeal committee at UEFA, European football’s governing body, reduced the sanction to eleven weeks. But it was quotes from de Boer within the press release announcing that decision that forced FC Barcelona to defend themselves against even a whisper of wrongdoing.
The UEFA Appeal Body ruled that it was ‘more than likely’ that de Boer had been the victim of contaminated supplements despite the fact the contaminated products in question had not been located. De Boer suspected the club’s doctors may have accidently given him contaminated tablets when he had a low white blood cell count, although he made it clear he had absolute trust in the club’s medical staff.
“In February, Barcelona gave me two or three yellow tablets because my level of white blood cells was low,” de Boer said, “I am not blaming Barcelona, but this has to be investigated further. It is possible that these tablets were responsible for the positive test. I do, however, trust the doctors from the Dutch federation and from Barcelona”.
In response, the head of Barcelona’s medical services, Dr. Josep Borrell, insisted that the club had never provided substances to any player that “could be considered to be a banned substance”. The club had never had a positive drug test, and there was no evidence they had engaged in wrongdoing, but this saga caused great embarrassment.
Given the severity of the scandal, it came as a great surprise therefore when Guardiola, who was still being diligently supervised by an FC Barcelona doctor, tested positive for the same anabolic steroid as de Boer while playing in Italy several months later.
At the start of Guardiola’s ordeal, de Boer gave his former teammate one piece of advice via the Spanish newspaper Marca, “If he wants to go to the World Cup, he should go looking for a good lawyer”.
Guardiola’s two failed doping tests
On 21st October, and on the 4th November 2001 after a match against Lazio in Rome, Pep Guardiola tested positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone. The matches were some of Guardiola’s first appearances for Brescia Calcio after his move from FC Barcelona that summer.
Nandrolone is a potent anabolic steroid that can drastically increase muscle mass at the expense of unwanted side effects such as acne, hair growth and voice changes. However, at lower dosages it has also been used by professional sportsmen and women to improve their strength and speed, and to increase their training load.
The steroid can be detected during doping analysis by the presence of its metabolites 19-norandrosterone. One of Guardiola’s two urine sample showed the presence of 9ng/ml of 19-norandrosterone, which was four times over the legal limit (2ng/ml). However, the amount of nandrolone found in Guardiola’s samples was still far less than the amount found in the samples of some other athletes such as the British 100m Olympic champion Linford Christie (200ng/ml).
In the days following the news of his positive drug tests, Guardiola hosted a press conference, accompanied by the Brescia doctor Ernest Alicicco, to protest his innocence. Guardiola was emphatic that he had never knowingly taken anabolic steroids.
“A machine says I have taken nandrolone, but I know I did not,” he said, “Before Piacenza I only took the multivitamins that Dr. Ramón Segura, my trusted physiologist, has prepared for me for six or seven years. They consist of only specific vitamins, as evidenced by the more than 60 doping tests that I have undertaken over the many years of my career, all came back negative. I am innocent and I’m going to prove it.”
Despite leaving Barcelona several months earlier, Guardiola’s supplementation regime was still overseen by the FC Barcelona consultant doctor Ramón Segura. Segura had been at Barcelona, as had Guardiola, at the time of de Boer’s positive.
Dr. Segura soon told the press that he was shocked at news of Guardiola’s failed drug test. “I cannot believe it. I have spoken with Guardiola and he cannot find an explanation, he is not aware of having taken anything that could cause him to test positive. Neither is it possible it was the vitamin supplements he takes,” said Dr. Segura in November 2001.
Given the timing of both de Boer and Guardiola’s positive nandrolone tests, Barcelona sent the supplements they had provided to the club’s players for testing to demonstrate no wrongdoing on their part. The results came back negative for nandrolone.
It did emerge however, during disciplinary proceedings brought forward by the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) against Guardiola, that Segura provided supplements to Guardiola which he could not have been sure were free of contaminants.
“Taking the supplements prescribed, supplied and guaranteed by the Prof. Ramon Segura, doctor of FC Barcelona for which the player previously played, constituted risky behaviour, also because said supplements were prepared with ‘raw materials purchased from different suppliers according to market availability’, outside of suitable ‘certification of the manufacturing companies (which was neither requested nor verified)’,” read the decision.
Nonetheless, the professional relationship between Dr. Segura and Guardiola was not impacted. Indeed, Barcelona re-hired Segura after Guardiola became the club’s manager in the 2008/2009 treble-winning season.
According to Segura, Guardiola took a keen interest in the aids his former physician provided to his players, perhaps in order that the pair could ensure that the Barcelona players did not accidently ingest banned products. “Guardiola took this program of daily supplementation very seriously and insisted to the players on the need for it and made sure they followed it,” Dr. Segura explained.
At the conclusion of the first instance of Guardiola’s doping case in 2001, the future manager was fined €50,000 by the Italian league, the Lega Nazionale Professionisti, and he was suspended from football for four months. When Guardiola appealed the CONI’s decision, he was unsuccessful.
It had been found that the supplements Guardiola had taken did not contain nandrolone and were therefore not the source of his positive tests. It was noted however that Guardiola had taken a risk by taking the supplements.
“Guardiola is not a beginner, but a profound connoisseur of the world of football who knows how products intended to enhance performance of athletes (for their own or others' interests) can easily contain prohibited substances, he should not have accepted the risk of taking products recommended to him, yes, by the company doctor, but of an inadequately safe origin,” stated the appeal decision in Guardiola’ case.
The nandrolone metabolites found in his samples had also not been endogenously produced by his body, which was an argument that Guardiola would adopt at later appeals.
However, the panel did reduce Guardiola’s ban below the minimum standard sanction of two years. This was an acknowledgement that Guardiola, while he may have been at fault, did not act with intent to cheat.
“I have never understood the four-month suspension, because either it is doping, or it is not doping. If I was guilty, they should have disqualified me for two years," said Guardiola after his failed appeal at the Court of Brescia.
The spate of nandrolone positives across professional sport
In 2001, Pep Guardiola and Frank de Boer were just two of the many footballers, and athletes, who tested positive for nandrolone. At the time a spate of nandrolone positives had engulfed professional sport.
In fact, two of Frank de Boer’s teammates from the Dutch national team, Jaap Stam and Edgar Davids, also tested positive for nandrolone that same year. Davids was playing for Juventus, who were under investigation as a club for doping, and Stam had recently joined Lazio from Manchester United.
Initially, it was proposed that de Boer, Stam and Davids may have been victims of supplement contamination while away together on international duty, even though their positives were spaced several months apart. However, the supplement manufacturer for the Dutch national team, Ortho Company, had already released test results showing their products were free from doping substances. The theory was then firmly laid to rest when Ortho Company went further and sent de Boer a legal letter demanding confirmation he would never mention the company again in relation to his doping case. The three players were however all cleared of any intent to cheat.
When eight professional tennis players tested positive for nandrolone over the same period, seven of which were never publicly named, a World Anti-Doping Agency report also concluded that the failed tests could not have been caused by a mass contamination event. The tennis authorities never reopened the cases.
This large spate of positives, in general, did however have a legitimate explanation.
“The reason for all these cases were undoubtedly, the presence on the market of dietary supplements containing what the industry referred to as ‘prohormones’, precursors of nandrolone such as norandrostenedione, norandrostenediol and isomers between 1995 - 2005,” the former WADA lab director Professor Christine Ayotte told Sporting Intelligence in 2017.
Prohormones are precursors to anabolic steroids, which means that they are not steroids in their original form, but after liver filtration they are converted into steroid hormones by the body.
Prohormones were introduced into the fitness supplement market by the US chemist Patrick Arnold in 1996. Arnold developed the designer steroid THG, also known as ‘the clear’, that lay at the centre of the BALCO doping scandal involving the chemist Victor Conte and the disgraced sprint queen Marion Jones. Jones was stripped of her five Olympics medals from Sydney 2000 after Conte was found to have provided her ‘the clear’ and erythropoietin (EPO) in the lead up to the Games.
By changing the formulation of some steroids, Arnold realised that prohormones, unlike anabolic steroids, could be sold legally. As these products were predicated on the fact that they were not active hormones, and that your body had to convert them into anabolic steroids, they were not considered controlled substances.
From then on anabolic steroids, in the form of prohormones, could be bought over the counter and online legally. When ‘19-nor’ prohormones were introduced onto the market –which were converted by the body into nandrolone – the flow of nandrolone positives began.
“So, many athletes tested positive for having consumed commercially available legal (but still considered doping) supplements correctly labelled or not,” says Ayotte.
The ease of access to anabolic steroids, through prohormones, was obviously a point of concern for doping authorities but the lack of regulation around these ‘dietary supplements’ was also causing problems for clean athletes.
Anabolic steroids are controlled substances, and pharmaceutical grade steroids must be manufactured under strict conditions. Prohormones, on the other hand, were unregulated and the manufacturing process lacked quality control. As such prohormone manufacturers often produced other legal products that were often incorrectly labelled or contaminated with prohormones.
In doping cases involving nandrolone, it soon became difficult to ascertain whether an athlete had knowingly cheated or not.
There were three scenarios in which an athlete could have ingested nandrolone in relation to prohormones; an athlete had knowingly doped by taking correctly labelled prohormones, or an athlete had knowingly taken prohormones, but it contained another anabolic steroid which was not on the label and thus the athlete was unaware it would appear during doping controls, or an athlete had taken an entirely legal supplement that was contaminated with prohormones.
And there are known examples of all three.
In 1999, the British sprinter Linford Christie, who won 100m gold at Barcelona 1992 tested positive for nandrolone. The amount of nandrolone found in Christie’s urine samples was one hundred times above the legal limit and it was therefore clear he was not a victim of low-level contamination but had indeed knowingly doped. In fact, Christine’s nandrolone levels were so elevated that it was surmised he could have injected nandrolone.
That same year, Marion Jones’ husband, the shot putter CJ Hunter, tested positive for nandrolone four times. At the time, both Hunter and Jones were doing their best to conceal their doping with the support of the chemist Victor Conte. Nevertheless, Conte still maintains, even today, that the positive test was caused by iron supplements they had been unaware were contaminated with prohormones.
And in 2003, a seemingly clean athlete, the US swimmer Kicker Vencill, won a lawsuit against a dietary supplement company for having contaminated multivitamins which caused him to test positive for nandrolone. Vencill was awarded $500,000 in damages.
Over a ten-year period, the unregulated world of prohormones had wreaked havoc in professional sport. The number of nandrolone positives only started to subside once prohormones were prohibited as part of the 2004 Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004.
“When these were banned in 2005, the number of findings decreased,” explains Professor Christine Ayotte.
Criminal proceedings against Guardiola
By 2005, Guardiola had successfully demonstrated to two civil tribunals that he had not knowingly ingested nandrolone however he had still been unable to locate the source of the steroid metabolites found in his sample. As such, more problems lay ahead.
Several years earlier, doping had been criminalised in Italy and after being sanctioned at a civil level, Guardiola was soon charged with criminal offences by the Brescia public prosecutor.
A renowned anti-doping expert testified on Guardiola’s behalf in court.
Dr. Jordi Segura, not to be confused with Ramón Segura, attempted to demonstrate endocrinologically to Judge Matteo Mantovani of the Court of Brescia, that Guardiola suffered from Gilbert syndrome and that this was the cause of his positive nandrolone test.
Gilbert syndrome is a genetic condition which can sometimes give rise to jaundice, which is the yellowing of the whites of the eyes and the skin. The condition is largely harmless, and patients do not usually need treatment but Jordi Segura testified that this condition had caused Guardiola’s body to endogenously produce nandrolone.
In the year of both de Boer and Guardiola’s positive tests, the Spanish sports doctor Marcos Maynar had already attempted to demonstrate, by conducting experiments, that physical exercise can cause the human body to produce nandrolone levels above those permitted by WADA.
The human body does indeed endogenously produce nandrolone, but Maynar’s experiments, while the science may have had merit, have in hindsight lost credibility. Maynar was banned for ten years for doping athletes in 2010, and upon his return to sport he was arrested again by the Guardia Civil, Spain’s military police, for providing cyclists with banned drugs. Such is Maynar’s lack of credibility, he still maintains he did not re-engage in doping athletes despite clear evidence of him doing so.
While Maynar has been cited as a ‘medical consultant’ to Guardiola in relation to nandrolone excretion. Maynar was never Guardiola’s doctor. Maynar was never used as an expert witness throughout any of Guardiola’s appeals and his doping of athletes was not known publicly at the time.
In October 2001, Maynar published the scientific paper titled ‘Determination of nandrolone and metabolites in urine samples from sedentary persons and sportsmen’.
In May 2005, despite the expert testimony of Jordi Segura, the then-director of WADA-accredited laboratory in Barcelona, Judge Matteo Mantovani convicted Guardiola. He was sentenced to a seven-month suspended prison sentence. Guardiola was also fined €9,000, and he was required to pay the prosecution’s legal fees. It was the first criminal conviction for doping in Italy after the special law 376 came into force in 2000 which legislated doping as a criminal offence.
After the trial, Guardiola’s lawyers were dismayed at how a man who was cleared of intent to cheat at a civil level could have also been convicted in the criminal courts.
“The presumption of guilt in a sporting context may exist, but in ordinary justice the burden of proof lies with the prosecution,” said Guardiola’s lawyer, “The prosecution has not brought a shred of evidence”.
Guardiola’s appeals allowed at last
Manel Estiarte is one of the greatest water polo players in history. He competed at six summer Olympics for Spain from Moscow 1980 to Sydney 2000. He is also one of Pep Guardiola’s trusted friends and confidants.
The Catalan pair met for the first time on the last day of the 1992 La Liga season during FC Barcelona’s title celebrations. From that point forth, Guardiola and Estiarte remained in close contact, and in 2008, Guardiola asked Estiarte if he would accompany him to Barcelona to assist him in his role as head coach. Estiarte now forms part of Guardiola’s inner circle.
“I don't know if angels exist and, if they do, if they help us. Much less if guardian angels exist. But, if they do exist, I believe you are one of them,” wrote Guardiola to his friend in the foreword to Estiarte’s autobiography.
Today, Estiarte occupies the role of Head of Player Relations at Manchester City, and the glowing terms in which Guardiola speaks of Estiarte can be better understood when one considers the pivotal role he played in ensuring Guardiola’s doping convictions were overturned.
It was Estiarte who discovered the pivotal ‘new evidence’ that allowed Guardiola to file motions for both his civil and criminal cases to be reopened.
In 2005, WADA scientists discovered that a phenomenon called ‘unstable urine’ could lead to positive tests for low levels of nandrolone. In very rare cases, the scientists found that this could be caused by a chemical reaction that took place in urine vials during storage. Guardiola believed he was a victim of ‘false’ nandrolone positives.
In order to avoid any future ‘false’ positives, WADA amended its laboratory operating guidelines and instructed all accredited labs to perform ‘stability tests’ on urine samples that returned positive results for nandrolone between the levels of 2 and 10ng/ml. The levels found in Guardiola’s two ‘A’ samples were 9ng/ml and 5ng/ml.
If a sample was deemed ‘stable’ protocols would continue as normal. If a sample was found to be ‘unstable’ the nandrolone positive was voided.
Guardiola’s defence team contested that both of Guardiola’s urine samples, collected two weeks apart, on 21st October and 4th November 2001, were both ‘unstable’. And that this was the cause of both positive tests.
The Italian anti-doping prosecutors argued that Guardiola’s appeal was not admissible because the change in WADA’s guidelines did not constitute ‘new evidence’.
When Guardiola samples were collected in 2001, the anti-doping laboratory correctly followed the testing procedures set by WADA at the time. The prosecutors also argued that Guardiola’s representatives had never contested how the sample was collected, or analysed, in his previous defence.
Nevertheless, Guardiola’s appeal was allowed in both his criminal and civil convictions.
Guardiola’s doping samples could not be tested for ‘instability’ as no samples remained to be analysed. However, Guardiola’s lawyers argued that his samples met all the parameters to be tested for instability.
Ultimately, the judge ruled in Guardiola’s favour and overturned his criminal conviction. In 2009, using the same defence, Guardiola was also successful in his appeal against the four-month doping suspension initially dealt by the Italian Olympic Committee in 2001.
“For these reasons, the CGF (Federal Court of Appeal) declares the appeal for revision pursuant to art. 39 CGS (Judicial Sports Code) admissible, as proposed above by Mr. Guardiola Sala Josep, accepts him and, as a result, absolves him of the ascribed guilt,” read the final appeal decision in 2009.
Guardiola’s eight-year fight was finally over. Guardiola’s convictions had been overturned. And he spoke with glee after one of the rulings.
"When the news spread all over the world it was very nasty. But today is the most beautiful day of my life since becoming a father," said Guardiola.
For other athletes however, who tested positive for nandrolone, Guardiola’s exoneration did not serve as a watershed moment in anti-doping. The hundreds of nandrolone convictions that been processed between 1995 and 2004 were never annulled.
When the unstable urine phenomena was discovered in 2005, WADA stood by the credibility of its nandrolone testing.
The then-WADA Director General David Howman contested that the thousands of past nandrolone positives remained valid. He said the chances of one urine sample being unstable was “very rare”. The chances were between 1 out of 1,000 and 1 out of 10,000 positive tests for nandrolone, according to Howman.
Still today the WADA regulations say unstable urine leads to positive nandrolone tests “in extremely rare circumstances”.
For many athletes therefore, their suspensions, although long ago elapsed, still officially stand.
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