Dangerous Roads

An appeals court ruled on Monday that Alberto Contador, a three-time winner of the Tour de France, used a performance-enhancing drug when he won the race in 2010, the latest black mark on a sport that has been tarnished by doping scandals over the past several years.
The decision from the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, which overturns an earlier ruling by the Spanish cycling federation, means that Contador will be banned from racing for two years.
Contador stopped racing between August 2010, when the positive test was announced, and last February, when the Spanish federation issued its decision. Thus, the suspension will end on August 5, shortly after this year’s Tour de France.
The panel also ordered that Contador, 29, of Spain, be stripped of his 2010 Tour title, which would go to the second-place finisher, Andy Schleck of Luxembourg. He will also lose all of his results from last season, including a second victory in the Giro d’Italia.
On the last rest day of the 2010 Tour, Contador tested positive for clenbuterol, a weight-loss and muscle-building drug that some riders illicitly use during the off-season to improve their performance on big climbs in the mountains. Contador said it came from tainted steaks that a friend had delivered from Spain to France.
He also tested positive for a category of chemicals known as plasticizers, which are found in some IV bags used to store blood. While it was not part of the current investigation, the presence of plasticizers suggested that Contador also engaged in blood doping.
The decision was another setback for a sport that has repeatedly had its top athletes become tangled in doping scandals. Since 1995, only two Tour de France winners — Carlos Sastre in 2008 and Cadel Evans last year — have not been tarnished by controversies involving performance-enhancing drugs.
On Friday, federal investigators announced that they had ended a criminal investigation of Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour from 1999 to 2005. The United States Anti-Doping Agency, with the support of the World Anti-Doping Agency, is continuing a separate investigation of Armstrong under its rules.
“This is a sad day for our sport,” said Pat McQuaid, the president of the International Cycling Union which, along with the World Anti-Doping Agency, had appealed the Spanish decision clearing Contador.
“Some may think of it as a victory but that is not at all the case. There are no winners when it comes to the issue of doping: every case, irrespective of its characteristics, is always a case too many.”
A spokesman for Contador’s team, Saxo Bank, said the decision was still being reviewed and declined to comment.
The investigation of Contador prompted claims from some in the cycling and antidoping communities that the process was compromised by conflicts of interest.
Although a German table tennis player, Dimitrij Ovtcharov, was cleared after testing positive for clenbuterol in 2010 using the same argument as Contador, the meal he blamed for his troubles was consumed in China, where evidence showed that use of the drug was widespread in animals.
The use of clenbuterol in animals that will enter the food supply is banned in Europe and the practice is a criminal offense in Spain. In 1990, 135 people in Spain were hospitalized after eating beef liver that was contaminated by clenbuterol. Evidence presented at the appeal, however, showed that farmers in Spain have stopped using the drug.
The amount of clenbuterol found in Contador’s blood was low, but any amount is deemed to be a violation of antidoping rules.
Contador was unable to provide samples of the beef that he said was purchased in Irun, near the French border, and delivered to his team’s hotel in Pau. So the case became a battle of experts who offered conflicting evidence about the plausibility of his claim.
Unlike the United States and many other countries, Spain does not have an independent anti-doping authority, so Contador’s case was initially heard by the country’s cycling federation.
Many independent antidoping experts, including Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, argue that because sports federations also exist to promote their disciplines, they are inherently conflicted when it comes to judging doping cases.
Contador, who has also won the Giro d’Italia twice, is a major celebrity in Spain. Former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero wrote in a message on the Spanish government’s Twitter page that “there’s no legal reason to justify sanctioning Contador.”
In January 2011, the Spanish cycling federation proposed that Contador should receive a one-year suspension from racing, rather than the two-year penalty that is customary for first offenses. But the next month, it changed course and cleared him.
In its decision on Monday, the tribunal concluded that neither blood transfusions — the World Anti-Doping Agency’s theory — nor Contador’s contaminated meat defense were the likely cause of the positive test. It concluded that food supplements which Contador consumed in great quantities were likely to blame.
The International Cycling Union, known by its French initials U.C.I., and the World Anti-Doping Agency appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

By IAN AUSTEN
Published: February 6, 2012
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/sports/cycling/alberto-contador-found-guilty-of-doping.html