Tour de France champion offers his samples up for retrospective testing
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Alberto Contador (Saxo Bank Sungard) heads to the win in Murcia.(Image credit: Rafa Gómez)
The Vuelta Murcia podium: Jerome Coppel (Saur Sojasun), Alberto Contador (Saxo Bank Sungard) and Denis Menchov (Geox-TMC)(Image credit: Rafa Gómez)
Alberto Contador (Saxo Bank Sungard) (Image credit: Rafa Gómez)
Alberto Contador (Saxo Bank) has described the trauma of dealing with the doping charge that was laid against him as “a scar that will stay with me for the rest of my life”. Speaking to Spanish sports paper AS, the three-time Tour de France winner revealed that the saga left him unable to sleep and even losing his hair. The affair, he said, had left his parents “upset, crying… You can’t imagine the amount of suffering.”
Contador stated that he has always supported the fight against doping. “I want the riders who are genetically the best to win. I’m not bitter and I know how to forget, but I don’t want to forget all this. There are things that I will always see differently.”
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Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014).
