The Italian Olympic committee CONI has recommended a two year suspension for Macro Fertonani for his testosterone positive from the Tour Méditerranéen in February, but the Italian from the Caisse d'Epargne team is fighting the results of the test. Any sanction would have to come from the Italian Cycling Federation, and Fertonani is confident that this organisation will agree that the adverse finding was the result of a laboratory error.
Fertonani's lawyer presented a report back in July to CONI which detailed the mistakes made by the Châtenay-Malabry lab, the same laboratory responsible for testing Floyd Landis' 2006 Tour de France samples which came up positive for testosterone. This week the 31 year-old released a statement giving more detail about the results of his test, which he insists do not add up to a positive. The press release states that the testosterone:epitestosterone ratio was below the 4:1 limit at 3.1:1, that all metabolites in the IRMS analysis had normal absolute values, that his total amount of testosterone was well below the limit of 200 ng/ml at 8.7.
