BEHIND CLOSED DOORS AT SALAZAR’S DOPING FACTORY
Using two sons as guinea pigs in rogue tests The damning email he sent to Lance Armstrong
AS an athlete who pushed too hard at the 1982 Boston Marathon, alberto Salazar received the last rites. as a coach who pushed too hard for an advantage, there will be no resurrection.
The question now, with his status in the ground, is how many others will end up there with him and what it will mean for Sir Mo Farah and UK athletics in particular.
What reputations will fall in the wake of this guilty verdict for doping violations?
It took the US anti-Doping agency four years to get the Cuban-born american — concluding with the statement detailing why he would be banned until October 2023. But the 61- year- old’s name had unofficially been mud long in advance of the final ruling.
He always had an obsession with victory — winning three straight new York Marathons from 1980 and nearly dying in the heat when winning in Boston — but as a coach since the mid-1990s the lines of his legality have been blurry.
The majority of his work has been done at the nike Oregon Project, a sprawling lab he effectively created in 2001 and which he has operated as his fiefdom.
It explored any avenue for increased performance, from altitude tents around an athlete’s bed to the prescription of unnecessary legal supplements. He became one of the most hyped coaches in the world and certainly one of the most thorough, as we have learned with some shock.
as an example, the ruling yesterday spoke of Salazar using his two sons as guinea pigs in June 2009 as a means of establishing how much testosterone gel could be applied before breaching the legal limits.
His justification through the case was built on an elaborate paranoia about one of his athletes being sabotaged by a rival camp and wanting to experiment on what it would take. USaDa contended the ‘ respondent committed an anti- doping rule violation because he “gave” a Prohibited Substance to a third party’.
That the closed doors of the lab opened at all came down to whistleblowers and journalism. Steve Magness operated as the former, having served as an assistant coach before his exit after 18 months in 2012.
He became concerned at what was going on there and would go on to tell the BBC’s Mark Daly that the nOP gold-silver of Mo Farah and Galen Rupp in the 10,000m at London 2012 was ‘one of the most disheartening moments of my life’.
The ruling spoke of multiple athletes being sent to Dr Jeffrey Brown for thyroid evaluation. Citing one period, the ruling said: ‘Dr Brown diagnosed at least four athletes of the nOP with hypothyroid conditions and treated at least three of them with thyroid replacement hormones.’
The use of thyroid medication when it allegedly wasn’t necessary came to light in the
Panorama investigation of 2015 in which Kara Goucher, the 2007 world 10,000m silver medallist, claimed Salazar told her to take the prescription thyroid drug Cytomel to lose weight.
One of the discussions around Salazar’s operation — one that has previously involved Farah — centred on the legal supplement L-carnitine, which helps convert fat to energy.
Salazar had become fascinated by it in 2011 and Magness was a guinea pig for an experiment into its effectiveness.
The results prompted Salazar to email Lance armstrong: ‘Lance, call me asap! We have tested it and it’s amazing! You are the only athlete I’m going to tell the actual numbers to other than Galen Rupp. It’s too incredible. all completely legal and natural. You will finish the Iron Man in about 16 minutes less while taking this. alberto.’
The rules state only infusions of less than 50ml can be permitted every six hours, yet in the ruling it was admitted by Dr Brown that Magness was given more. It was also found by majority that Salazar had been instructing his athletes to ‘deny they had the L- carnitine infusion when asked about infusions when getting drug tested in or out of competition’.
By extension, the panel at the hearing stated his ‘conduct with this instruction is intentional and fraudulent conduct that was designed to prevent normal procedures from occurring’. It is a scathing finding.
Dr Robin Chakraverty, formerly UK athletics’ chief medical officer and now with the England football team, was at the centre of a controversy involving L-carnitine and Farah in 2017. He admitted he had administered it to Farah via an injection but had not properly documented the treatment, although he claimed he was well within the WaDa limits.
Farah won all four of his Olympic titles and world golds in his nOP years between 2011 and 2017, but ever since the USaDa investigation into Salazar and his practices began, the Brit has been under a cloud.
He has always maintained his innocence and even his anger at conclusions drawn from missed doping tests and association with Salazar.
It will be far harder for him to shake off the questions now. Just as it will for neil Black, the performance director of UK athletics who hailed Salazar as a ‘genius’ and used him as a consultant. The governing body cleared Farah to continue working with Salazar in 2015. With this verdict, that decision looks woefully misguided.