Alberto Contador and his legal team have contradicted the contents of this morning’s El Pais article, rejecting claims that WADA had eliminated food contamination as the source of his positive test for Clenbuterol.
A statement released today by the rider’s representatives said that the line of defence put forward by Contador remains a valid one, and implied that WADA had not done sufficient tests to prove otherwise.
“After careful study of the documentation sent by the UCI, which contains the report of a detective agency hired to trace the origin of the meat, it’s not possible to determine that the meat was not contaminated,” the statement read.
“In fact, the work of the detectives was limited to asking the butcher in question if there the meat is sold with all health guarantees, receiving the expected response, and asking who are their suppliers, accepting the information as good without questioning it. And the same with some suppliers. In the documentation sent [to the Spanish cycling federation], there is no evidence that the WADA has made any kind of analysis of the butcher in question, much less, in slaughterhouses which are mentioned.”
The statement also found issue with the quoted statistic from the report, which said that of 300,000 samples of meat analysed in Europe 2008, just one showed traces of Clenbuterol. Contador’s legal team claim that only 0.4% of the slaughtered animals must be tested under EU ruled. It says that the latest European Union report for 2008 says that 122,648 samples (0.48%) were tested out of 27 million cattle slaughtered, and that only 22,518 of these were tested for beta agonists, including clenbuterol.
As a result, Contador’s lawyers plan to tell the RFEC Competition Committee that they consider the current system of meat control as being insufficient to detect fraud.
It also finds fault with the reasoning attributed to WADA by the El Pais article that any farmers using Clenbuterol would only inject animals at least 20 days before slaughter, thus avoiding positive tests.
“Such reasoning is fallacious,” they argue, “because if so we have to admit also that it is absurd that any athlete uses a banned substance, especially because sport's controls are much more abundant than livestock and use much more sophisticated detection methods than those used in veterinary medicine.”
Contador’s lawyers therefore insist that the WADA/UCI report does not rule out food contamination as a possible cause of the positive test. Futhermore, they argue that there is insufficient evidence to show that his positive test was due to doping.
Burden of proof:
While the statement seeks to cast doubt on WADA’s ability to show there is no chance that Clenbuterol entered Contador’s system via food contamination, it does overlook the requirement for an athlete in his position to show beyond all doubt that a banned substance was not deliberately ingested.
WADA rules place the burden of proof on the sportsperson concerned, and so it remains to be seen if being critical of the World Anti Doping Agency and the European Union’s testing will achieve anything.
The American swimmer Jessica Hardy succeeded in proving beyond doubt that her Clenbuterol positive came from a contaminated food supplement. Despite that, she still incurred a twelve month suspension.
Contador’s statement concluded by saying that in the next few days, the rider and his legal team are ready to provide the RFEC Competition Committee arguments and evidence that will “prove to the competent authority of the falsity of the parallel trials and malicious leaks that are appearing about this case in the media.”
Contador reiterated again that he had never doped and that tainted meat was the source of the Clenbuterol traces. His lawyers said they looked forward to the chance to prove his innocence soon.