In mid-April the anti-doping police knocked on Andorra’s door. Agents from the International Testing Agency (ITA), the independent office for the control and management of doping affairs of several international federations, specialized in the fight against doping, informed the Vitorian cyclist that they were opening an investigation file after having observed that over the previous three years his biological passport had shown anomalous values on four occasions. The Red Bull rider was told, according to sources close to the investigation, that they needed him to provide them with his mobile phone and his personal computer to turn them over and investigate his alleged friendships with the doping underworld, suppliers, doctors, colleagues, coaches, and, beyond his relationship with Leo Piepoli, his official coach at Movistar, his possible connections with Extremaduran coaches in his years at Caja Rural, a team in which he spent his years as an amateur, one of the best that Spanish cycling had known. A crack since he was a cadet who, at the age of 25, handed over his cell phone and computer with his privacy.
Although after April he did not compete in any race again (the last one he ran was Paris-Roubaix on Sunday the 13th), Lazkano was still part of Red Bull and in May he participated in the team’s training camp in Andorra with a view to the Dauphiné Libéré, the mountainous event in which, showing exceptional ability for a big and heavy rider. One month later, in the Tour, Lazkano passed first over the top of the Tourmalet. despite his efforts that Movistar showed in keeping him as the spearhead of the team. He gained the greatest economic power of the German team. It was in the Andorran concentration in May when Lazkano underwent the last anti-doping test and when the team decided to stop him. He did not do either the Dauphiné or the Tour or any other races. Without any explanation, Lazkano disappeared from the cycling radar.
Until the end of October. Last Thursday, the ITA’s client in the case, the International Cycling Union (UCI), announced that the investigation file against Lazkano, 25, had become a disciplinary file accompanied by a provisional suspension for alleged doping that will be resolved in a week. The panel of three hematological experts who had studied his hematological profile and the reticulocyte and hemoglobin data that were outside the established pattern, had unanimously concluded that it was more likely that Lazkano had resorted to a prohibited method (EPO, transfusions…) to increase his performance. The cyclist, who did not offer credible explanations for these values, faces a possible sanction of four years of suspension. Passport anomalies are an indirect method: there is no substance found in urine or blood.
The visit, and its content, followed by a three-year investigative process, summarize in a certain way the new way of acting of the anti-doping agencies and their use of increasingly heavy artillery in an increasingly complicated environment. Although the statistics they use indicate a prevalence of doping in world sport of more than 20%, traditional analyzes in laboratories do not detect prohibited substances in more than 2% of analyzed samples. The use of persistence and intelligence as a solution is accompanied in the fight against doping by a regulation so strict that it is considered a duty to tell the truth and that whoever lies, behavior that is sometimes necessary for those who defend themselves, deserves a sanction separate from that of doping. This punishment was suffered by the athlete Mo Katir for crudely modifying the date on a boarding pass that would have proven an unexpected trip on a day when he did not open the door to a controller (a two-year sanction became four), and it could also have been imposed, moreover, on Lazkano if he had not delivered what was required: not collaborating is equivalent to obstructing.
And the cyclist had always collaborated throughout three years of countless surprise checks at home in the years (from 2022 to 2024) when he was at Movistar, the time when they found strange parameters or in the few months in which he raced at Red Bull. It was a methodical and meticulous process, similar to the one used by athletics anti-doping with the marathon world record holder, in whose cell phone they found evidence of an alleged doping network. And the ITA only took the final step when the fourth anomalous value jumped and it finally felt that it had tied up all the ends.
The suspension of Lazkano has awakened good faith fans from a certain torpor, a cloud in which all the protagonists of cycling repeat that the dark times have passed to the repeated questions, has cycling changed? There is also concern in Telefónica, the main sponsor of the Movistar team, and in Abarca, the company that owns the team owned by Eusebio Unzue and the Israeli shipping company Idan Ofer (43% of the shares). In a statement made public on Friday, Movistar stressed that it was obviously unaware of the data from the cyclist’s biological passport without needing to remember that neither its doctors nor its leaders have access to the data collected in the Adams program, protected by the rider’s personal password. The results of the tests required by the UCI every four months were also normal, the team explains. Red Bull had no suspicion either when it hired him, and this also surprises the experts, who remember that when a team is going to sign a rider the first thing it asks for is his TrainingPeaks password (the training program) and that of Adams.
