Thursday’s press conference, at which cycling team Bahrain-Victorious answered reporters’ questions, like every selection before the start of the Tour de France, turned into, well, a funny spectacle. The journalists had dutifully brought a lot of questions, especially about the police visits that the team had received again in the past few days. But because the driver and supervisor couldn’t or didn’t want to say anything about all this, the question and answer session was quickly over.
The investigators from France and the Europol authority provided a little more enlightening information on Friday. They spoke of an operation aimed at “banned substances in cycling”. Around 14 properties in Italy, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia and Denmark were searched between June 27 and 30; also the team hotel in Copenhagen, where the first stage of this year’s tour started on Friday evening.
The focus of the investigations was the sports director, three drivers – the Italian Damiano Caruso convicted himself as being affected – plus an osteopath, a team doctor and the seat of the team owner in Italy. Investigators confiscated “electronic material (cellphones, computers, hard drives)” and, and this is where it gets interesting, “drugs” that authorities say are “prescription or of unknown origin.” All confiscated evidence will be forensically examined.
Drivers, supervisors and team management have always denied unfair practices
So now at least some light has been drawn into an undertaking that began on the last tour and with which the suspicion of doping firmly nested in the peloton. At that time, 50 police officers searched the hotel of the Bahrain selection in Pau and confiscated laptops, mobile phones and medicines, as is the case now; back then, too, it was about allegedly illegally used preparations. The excitement was great, the public prosecutor’s office in Marseille, which is in charge of the operation then as now, was silent for a long time.
There were only reports that three drivers had hair samples containing tizanidine – a powerful muscle-relaxing drug prescribed for herniated discs, osteoarthritis and multiple sclerosis (the team did not deny its use). The substance is not on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list, and the fact that professional cyclists apparently consume it at least suggests what experts have long suspected: that the peloton continues to swallow what helps and is not explicitly prohibited.
Will the investigation yield anything concrete? The Marseille prosecutors had already orchestrated an operation two years ago against the French team Arkéa-Samsic, apparently without success. The Bahrain selection and their employees have repeatedly been in the dark in recent years, be it due to earlier doping bans against drivers like Caruso, suspicions about the manager Milan Erzen, who is said to have asked the Erfurt doping doctor Mark Schmidt (Erzen has unfair Practices always rejected) or controversial gestures with which the driver Matej Mohoric apparently aimed at critics and investigators last year. The team had recently reaffirmed that they would always follow all the rules, with the investigations obviously wanting to damage the team’s reputation.
Only this much is certain: if you are as successful on the tour as the team’s drivers were last time, you will usually not get away from the questions so quickly – especially the uncomfortable ones.
