has reported this Thursday in a brief and sober statement that he is provisionally suspended due to “anomalies” in his biological passport detected in the period 2022-2024, the three seasons in which the rider, who signed for Red Bull last autumn, had become one of the best in the Spanish peloton running for Movistar, which signed him from Caja Rural at the end of 2021.
As soon as the UCI announced the case, Red Bull immediately announced the rider’s dismissal with a statement as succinct and eloquent as that of the international cycling federation: “We confirm that Oier Lazkano will no longer be part of our team. This is due to the UCI’s decision to provisionally suspend him. The matter refers to the 2022-2024 seasons, a period prior to his joining our team.”
The UCI regulations also provide for a fine commensurate with their income for those sanctioned for doping, a situation in which Lazkano has not yet found himself.
The sporting career of Oier Lazkano, 25, became an indecipherable mystery six months ago. After finishing 117th in Paris-Roubaix on April 13, the Alava cyclist did not compete again. Disappeared from the map. When the people in charge of his team, Red Bull, were asked, they, who had decided to preventively suspend him when they received the first notification from the UCI, did not give reasons, they responded that they could not say anything, that there was a pact of silence with the rider.
The leaders of his previous team, Movistar, responded that it was impossible to know anything about him, that he did not respond to the messages they sent him or pick up the phone. The Spanish cycling world, the fans, were lost. The most daring developed theories that questioned the mental health of the rider, one of the best riders in the Spanish peloton, a kid of tremendous strength who performed with care and enthusiasm in the toughest classics, pavés, rain, cold, Flanders and Roubaix. His move to Andorra to monetize the large contract (1.5 million euros per year) signed with Red Bull away from the Treasury had aggravated his condition, they added. He was a runner in progress, champion of Spain in 2023. Anyone who reported that there was something strange in their anti-doping controls was called perverted.
Finally, it is concluded that Oier Lazkano is simply one more in the network of guilty and complicit silence that continues to surround the relationship between cycling and doping.
It is a record over the months of the athlete’s blood values, hematocrit, hemoglobin, reticulocytes. An index obtained through a quotient between them indicates whether there may have been blood manipulation – taking EPO, blood transfusions – not detected in the usual anti-doping controls. The athlete who presents abnormal values is asked what reasons could have caused them, an illness, an accident… When the answer is not clear, a panel of independent experts decides whether he can be charged with doping and apply a provisional sanction until the anti-doping court makes a decision. The UCI has not reported when the International Testing Agency (ITA), the organization to which its anti-doping department has been subrogated, will issue a final ruling. The biological passport protocol was launched when anti-doping authorities found that EPO controls were not capable of detecting microdoses of erythropoietin that cause athletes to artificially increase their ability to transport and use oxygen from the blood in their muscles.
One of the great stars of Spanish athletics, Marta Domínguez from Palencia, patient of Eufemiano Fuentes and world champion in 2009, was suspended and stripped of the title in 2014 when the international athletics federation was able to pursue her complaint regarding her biological passport. The Englishman Chris Froome added to his record in 2019 a second Vuelta a España, the one in 2011, when the Cantabrian Juan José Cobo was dispossessed of it, whose doping was discovered through the biological passport.
