Alberto Contador in Trouble Again after Failing a Drug Test
Alberto Contador is a cycling phenomenon. Having started the sport at the age of 14, he has established himself as one of the greatest climbing specialists in the sport. He is a very talented all rounder as well and has won the Tour de France 3 times already. But the great cyclist has had a few run ins with the law of cycling. He has had allegations thrown at him thrice in the past about drug use and the most recent one has actually confirmed that traces of a banned substance were found in his sample after his 2010 Tour de France win. The cycling world waits to see if he can bounce back from this or if his career is tarnished forever.
Contador was born in a small town in Madrid, Spain in 1982, the third of four children. He was a very active child taking part in many different sports but he discovered cycling at the age of 14 thanks to his brother. He started training and entered amateur level competitions in Spain at the age of 15. He did not manage to win anything in his early years but he developed a strength in climbing that would become his signature in later life. He dropped out of school at the age of 16 to pursue cycling full time and in 2000 he started to win competitions.
Contador turned professional in 2003 riding for ONCE-Eroski which would later become known as Liberty Seguros. In 2003, he won the eighth stage of the Tour de Pologne and that started his winning streak. This winning streak was briefly interrupted when he had to have risky brain surgery after he was diagnosed with a cerebral cavernoma; a dangerous brain condition. He recovered in 2004 and got back onto his bike and started racing again. In 2006, Contador won various stages on the Tour de Romandie and Tour de Suisse. In 2007, he signed with a new team; Discovery Channel and started on a new path in his career. He won the 2007 Tour de France by the slightest margin and switched teams for the 2008 season joining Astana.
Even though Contador did win a few races in 2008, he could not defend his Tour de France win because his team had been banned for the part it played in a serious doping allegation surrounding Operation Puerto. In 2009 the Spaniard won his second Tour de France yellow jersey by beating his nearest rival by a margin of four minutes and he even beat the legendary Lance Armstrong who had returned to the competition that year. This year the climbing specialist won his third Tour de France and cemented his place in the history books.
Despite all his wins and accolades, Contador has been the subject of numerous doping allegations over his career. The first was Operation Puerto which was conducted to unearth cases of doping that were alleged to have taken place in 2006. He along with four of his team mates and his team Astana were all implicated in the case but they were later cleared by Spanish courts.
The second allegation that came Contador’s way surrounded the 2009 Tour de France and in particular the Verbier climb section of the race. A fellow rider and former Tour champion, Greg LeMond, wrote an article throwing allegations on the Spaniard. LeMond used calculations done by French physiology professor Antoine Vayer, to claim that the time to climb the stage by Contador was not possible without resorting to performance enhancing drugs. The calculations were later rubbished by two other physiologists.
The most recent doping issue that Contador has faced is that during the second rest day in the 2010 Tour de France race, he was subject to a random drug test and traces of a performance enhancing drug were found in his urine sample. He has denied the claim that he took the drugs on purpose and has stated that he must have eaten contaminated food. That is one of the oldest reasons given when trying to justify a failed drugs test by athletes; weightlifters used it during their failed drug tests during the Beijing Olympic Games.
It is not known whether Contador will be able to recover his image from this latest doping scandal. If he is proven to be guilty, he will face the prospect of losing his Tour de France title and will probably also face an uncertain future. If he is found to be guilty the sport’s governing body should make an example out of him in light of all his previous allegations and for bringing the sport into disrepute.
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