WADA blow to Contador’s "tainted meat" defence

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) appears to have severely undermined Alberto Contador’s insistence that he ate meat contaminated with the clenbuterol that caused his positive test during the Tour de France. In a report presented to the UCI and then passed on to the Spanish cycling federation, WADA says that it has tested meat from the butcher’s shop in Irún in northern Spain where Contador’s steak was bought and found no traces of clenbuterol. Similar tests at the abattoir that supplies the Irún butcher’s also found no trace of clenbuterol use.

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). 

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