List of doping cases in cycling

The following is an incomplete list of doping cases and recurring accusations of doping in professional cycling, where doping means "use of physiological substances or abnormal method to obtain an artificial increase of performance." It is neither a list of shame nor a list of illegality, as the first laws were not passed until 1965 and their implementation is an ongoing developing process. Thus the list contains doping incidents, those who have tested positive for illegal performance-enhancing drugs, prohibited recreational drugs or have been suspended by a sports governing body for failure to submit to mandatory drug testing. It also contains and clarifies cases where subsequent evidence and explanation has shown the parties to be innotrcent of illegal practice.
In 1963, the Council of Europe gave the following definition of doping:
The International Olympic Committee slightly modified this, and adopted this definition:
In 1886, a Welsh cyclist is popularly reputed to have died after drinking a blend of cocaine, caffeine and strychnine, supposedly in the Bordeaux–Paris race. This was included in the 1997 International Olympic Committee study on the Historical Evolution of Doping Phenomenon, and listed as the presumed first death due to doping during a competition. The report did allow that in this period it was common practice, and not illegal. This is alternatively reported as 'trimethyl" poisoning (a compound which does not actually exist). However, the main Bordeaux–Paris race did not start until 1891, and the cyclist who supposedly died in 1886, Arthur Linton, actually finished second in 1896 and died a few weeks later, reportedly from a combination of drug-induced exhaustion and typhoid fever. Linton was managed by the notorious Choppy Warburton - see 1896 below. The story may be apocryphal.
Nitroglycerine was used to stimulate the heart after cardiac attacks and was credited with improving riders' breathing. Riders suffered hallucinations from the exhaustion and perhaps the drugs. The American champion Major Taylor refused to continue a New York race, saying: "I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand."
Warburton was banned from the sport after unproven claims of massive doping in the 1896 Bordeaux–Paris. His activities may have contributed to the early deaths of Arthur Linton, Tom Linton and Jimmy Michael.
The acceptance of drug-taking in the Tour de France was so complete by 1930 that the rule book, distributed by Henri Desgrange, reminded riders that drugs would not be provided by the organisers.
The Wiel's-Groene Leeuw affair – At the stage from Luchon to Carcassonne of the 1962 Tour de France, twelve riders fell ill and said 'bad fish' was the cause. Tour doctor Pierre Dumas realized they had all been given the same drug by the same soigneur. Hans Junkermann of Germany had been ill overnight so the start was delayed by 10 minutes, but at the first hill he got off his bike and sat by the roadside, telling onlookers "I ate bad fish at the hotel last night." Eleven other riders abandoned the Tour that day, including the former leader, Willy Schroeders, the 1960 winner Gastone Nencini and a future leader, Karl-Heinz Kunde. Jacques Goddet wrote that he suspected doping but nothing was proven - other than that none of the hotels had served fish the previous night.
France passed its first anti-doping law in November 1964.
Performance-enhancing drugs became illegal on 1 June 1965. The first riders to be caught were four amateurs, three Spanish (Luis Santamarina, Canet and Usamentiaga) and one Briton (Ken Hill), who were thrown out of the Milk Race when they tested positive for amphetamines after Professor Arnold Beckett first applied sensitive gas chromatographic techniques to monitor drug abuse.
On 29 July testing began at the Tour de France. Raymond Poulidor was the first rider to be tested in the Tour at the end of a stage to Bordeaux. He said "I was strolling down the corridor in ordinary clothes when I came across two guys who asked if I was a rider. They made me go into a room, I pissed into some bottles and they closed them without sealing them. Then they took my name, my date of birth, without asking for anything to check my identity. I could have been anyone, and they could have done anything they liked with the bottles." The next morning, on the way to the Pyrenees, the riders climbed off, began walking and shouting protests.
In 1974, an advance in testing caught 13 prominent riders including Herman Van Springel.
During the 1979 Tour de France, the leader of the mountains classification Giovanni Battaglin tested positive for doping in stage 13. He was penalized by 10 minutes in the general classification, lost the points that he earned in stage 13 and received 10 penalty points in the mountains classification. Battaglin was still able to win the mountains classification.
Frans Van Looy and Gilbert Chaumaz also tested positive for doping during the Tour. After the Tour de France had finished, Joop Zoetemelk was found to have used doping, which he confessed later. Zoetemelk was penalized by 10 minutes in the general classification, but kept his second place.
Systematic blood doping at the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The U.S. cycling team's successes were coloured by revelations that riders had blood transfusions before their events, a practice known as blood-doping. The transfusions were to increase red blood cells in riders' blood. That would take more oxygen to their muscles. They received the blood of others with similar blood types. The practice, instigated by national coach Eddie Borysewicz, was not against Olympic rules although Games medical guidelines discouraged it. Borysewicz and a colleague, Ed Burke, set up a clinic in a Los Angeles motel room and four of the seven athletes who had transfusions won medals. The U.S. federation banned blood-doping in January 1985. Borysewicz and Burke were fined a month's pay. Mike Fraysse, a former president of the federation, was demoted from first to third vice-president.
Riders who received transfusions included Steve Hegg, who won a gold and a silver, and Rebecca Twigg, Pat McDonough and Leonard Nitz who all won silver medals. The others who received transfusions were John Beckman, Mark Whitehead and Brent Emery. The rest of the team had refused.
The emergence of EPO - In the late 1980s a recombinant drug created for people suffering from kidney failure became a substance abused by athletes seeking enhanced stamina and performance. The drug is recombinant erythropoietin, known as EPO, which was developed by the Amgen company. Recombinant EPO is a bio-manufactured copy of a hormone normally produced in the kidney and was not detectable by any test at the time.
EPO stimulates the bone marrow in order to increase red blood cell production and thus the body's ability to carry oxygen. A study of 15 Swedish athletes by the Stockholm Institute of Gymnastics and Sports found an improvement of nearly 10 percent in aerobic performance. "Average" red blood cell volume of the population at sea level is about 45% red blood cells. About 5% of the population has less than 40% red blood cell, which is defined as "anemia" and 5% of the population, including many world class athletes, have a natural red blood cells volume of 50%... 1% of the population has 54% red blood cell volume.
The increased thickness of the blood (above 70% red blood cells) increases the risk of blood clotting which can block blood vessels causing a heart attack or stroke, especially in the middle of the night when the heart's rate is lowest. Doctors and blood specialists concluded that the drug could have been implicated in the deaths of as many as 18 European professional bicycle racers between 1987 and 1991. One of them was Johannes Draaijer, a 27-year-old Dutch rider who finished 130th in the 1989 Tour de France, and died from a heart attack in February 1990. Although the autopsy did not specify the cause of death, Draaijer's wife later told the German news magazine Der Spiegel that her husband became sick after using EPO.
The PDM Affair, In November 1997, Cyclingnews.com reported about an inquiry that had just been made public in The Netherlands. This inquiry appeared to reveal doping in the PDM cycling team. The doctor of the team from between 1990 and 1991 was Wim Sanders who was the centre of the investigation which was reported to have been initiated when the General Manager of the team, Manfred Krikke, called the FIOD (Fiscal Information and Investigation Service) to investigate the medical business of the team. It was said that Wim Sanders supplied anabolic steroids and EPO to the team and was responsible for the "intralipid affair" of the 1991 Tour de France, when the entire team withdrew due to what was reported at the time as food poisoning. In a 2008 TV documentary; team members and team doctor Wim Sanders explain how the cause was in fact careless storage of Intralipid, a nutritional aid with which the team members had been injected.
According to cyclingnews.com, 1990 was the height of the drug taking in the team and during this year, two riders had to stop with acute heart problems; whether this refers to stopping with professional cycling or performance-enhancing drugs is unclear. Team manager Gisbers denied any knowledge of doping in the team.
PDM. Some teams used sophisticated recovery techniques whereby riders were put on a drip during the night and fed nutrients such as Vitamin B12. This practice was blamed when the entire PDM team went down with a fever on the 10th Stage of the Tour de France. PDM management blamed a virus although only riders were infected. Ten days later a press release stated that the team had used recovery substances which were past their sell-by date.
The Telekom Affair – In May 2007, several former riders admitted to using banned substances (including EPO) while riding for the team in the mid-1990s, including Erik Zabel, Rolf Aldag, Brian Holm, Bjarne Riis, Bert Dietz, Udo Bölts and Christian Henn including the seasons in which Riis and Jan Ullrich won the Tour de France. Team doctors Andreas Schmid and Lothar Heinrich also confessed to participating and administering banned substances. The latter was Team Telekom's sporting director until 3 May 2007, when he was suspended following allegations published in former team member Jef d'Hont's book.
On 25 May 2007, Riis issued a statement confessing to taking EPO, growth hormone and cortisone for five years, from 1993 to 1998, including during his victory in the 1996 Tour de France. Earlier in the week, five of Riis' former teammates from Team Telekom confessed to having used banned substances during the 1990s when Riis won the Tour. Riis said that he bought and injected the EPO himself, and team coach Walter Godefroot turned a blind eye to the drug use on the team. Riis was removed from the official record books of Tour de France, but in July 2008 he was written back into the books along with additional notes about his use of doping.
The Festina Affair is the events that surround several doping scandals, doping investigations and confessions of riders to doping that occurred during and shortly after the 1998 Tour de France. The affair began when a large haul of doping products was found in a car of the Festina cycling team just before the start of the race, which led to a large-scale police investigation against the Festina Team, this was followed by the re-opening of a separate police investigation case into the TVM team, and a subsequent searching of many teams during the race for possession of illicit doping substances. The affair highlighted systematic doping and suspicion of a widespread network of doping in many teams of the Tour de France, and was characterised by the constant negative publicity of the cases, police searches of hotels, a spate of confessions by retired and current riders to doping, the detainment and arrest of many team personnel, protests by riders in the race, as well as mass withdrawal of several teams from the race.
1999 Tour de France - In 2005 the French sports daily L'Équipe accused Lance Armstrong of using the performance-enhancing drug EPO during the race. For years, it had been impossible to detect the drug, called erythropoietin, until UCI began using a urine test for EPO in 2001. According to the newspaper, tests on 1999 urine samples were done to help scientists improve their detection methods. The newspaper said 12 samples had revealed EPO use, including six from Armstrong. In 2006 a UCI appointed independent lawyer, Emile Vrijman, released a report in 2006 claiming that Lance Armstrong should be cleared of any suspicion surrounding the retrospective testing of the 1999 Tour de France. Vrijman denounced the manner in which the doping laboratory in Châtenay-Malabry carried out its research, claiming that there were too many procedural and chain of custody gaps. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) rejected it, calling it defamatory to WADA and its officers and employees, as well as the accredited laboratory involved.
In that same year, a second French daily newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, reported that Spanish rider Manuel Beltrán, Danish Bo Hamburger and Colombian Joaquim Castelblanco were suspected of being among those whose frozen urine samples reportedly tested positive.
2001 Giro d'Italia - The Giro was overshadowed by a series of scandals related to doping. Police raided the hotels of several teams during the race, uncovering a variety of banned substances. Italian Dario Frigo, who was fighting for the race lead at the time, was expelled from the race as a result. The week prior to the raid saw Pascal Hervé and Riccardo Forconi expelled from the race after testing positive for EPO. Italian police carried out anti-drugs raids on a number of hotels in the town of San Remo where the participants of the race were staying. About 200 officers were involved in the raid. Police officers search the rooms of riders from all 20 teams, confiscating medicines. The organizers decided to cancel the 18th stage after second-placed Dario Frigo was sacked by Fassa Bortolo team after illegal drugs were found in his room. Frigo later admitted carrying them as security in case he needed a boost during the final stages of the race. Italian Marco Pantani was banned for six months after an insulin syringe was found in his room. On appeal the ban was lifted.
Oil for Drugs was an Italian doping case against doctor Carlo Santuccione and a number of accomplices, started in 2003. He was accused of administering prohibited doping products to professional and amateur athletes, to enhance their performance as well as being involved in doping network across Italy.
2006 Tour de France was marred by doping scandals. Prior to the tour, numerous riders - including the two favourites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso - were expelled from the Tour due to their link with the Operación Puerto doping case. After the end of the race, the apparent winner Floyd Landis was found to have failed a drug test after stage 17; Landis contested the result and demanded arbitration. On 20 September 2007 Landis was found guilty and suspended retroactive to 30 January 2007 and stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title making Óscar Pereiro the title holder.
Operación Puerto doping case (meaning Operation Mountain Pass) is a Spanish doping case against doctor Eufemiano Fuentes and a number of accomplices, started in May 2006. He is accused of administering prohibited doping products to 200 professional athletes, to enhance their performance. Tour de France's favorites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso were expelled from the Tour de France before the race started.
2007 Tour de France - The event was affected by a series of scandals and speculations related to doping. By the end of the Tour, two cyclists were dismissed for testing positive, the wearer of the yellow jersey, Michael Rasmussen was voluntarily retired by his team for lying about his whereabouts and missing doping tests. A fourth rider was confirmed to having used doping while in a training session prior to the 2007 Tour and a fifth rider tested positive late in the race, with his result being officially announced just after the end of the Tour. Along the way, two teams contesting the competition were asked to withdraw due to positive tests of at least one member.