Contador's lawyers face uphill task in doping case - Sports- NBC Sports

PARIS (AP) -Alberto Contador advances a host of claims, from contaminated meat to questionable laboratory practices, to explain why he should not be punished for testing positive at this year's Tour de France for the banned performance enhancer clenbuterol. But closer scrutiny of his arguments suggests that his lawyers could have a very hard time getting the three-time Tour champion off the hook. Here are some reasons why:

THE BEEF: Contador says the only possible explanation is that a filet mignon he ate was contaminated by clenbuterol and that is why minute traces of the drug showed up in his urine. It is true that farmers in Spain, where Contador says the meat was bought, and other countries are known to have used the drug to bulk up animals and that dozens of people fell ill because of clenbuterol-tainted meat in Spain and elsewhere in Europe in the 1990s.

But the European Union outlawed clenbuterol for animal fattening in 1996 and systematically monitors farms to ensure that the ban is enforced. Only once did clenbuterol show up in 83,203 animal samples tested by EU countries in 2008 and 2009, says the European Commission's directorate for health and consumer policy. Spain tested 19,431 samples in those years; none were positive for the drug, it adds. Illegal use of clenbuterol in European farming "has indeed become rare," says the office's spokesman, Frederic Vincent.

Which suggests that Contador would have been extremely unfortunate to stumble across a tainted steak. That's one reason why Fernando Ramos, a food contamination specialist at Portugal's Coimbra University, doesn't buy it.

"It's not impossible but improbable," he says. "In my opinion, it's just a story."

THE LAB: Contador claims that just four of the world's 34 accredited anti-doping laboratories, including the Cologne lab in Germany that analyzed his samples, are cutting-edge enough to have detected the minute traces of clenbuterol that were found.

"The system is very questionable," Contador told a news conference when his test was announced. "As it stands now, the system must be evaluated."

But the Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected that argument when Spanish hurdler Josephine Onyia used it last year.

As with Contador, Cologne found clenbuterol in her urine. She, too, blamed contaminated meat as a possible cause and said it was discriminatory that not all labs could have detected the drug in such small amounts.

CAS shot down that reasoning. "Akin to arguing that a thief should be let off because if he had not been chased by the quickest policeman in the force he would have escaped," CAS ruled in banning Onyia for two years.

So, for Contador, that line of defense looks like a nonstarter.

CONTAMINATED FOOD: It's an excuse athletes often fall back on but have little luck with. Polish kayak competitor Adam Seroczynski got nowhere at CAS last year with a claim that contaminated food could explain his clenbuterol positive at the Beijing Olympics. The International Olympic Committee and the director of London's anti-doping lab told CAS it is "very rare and unlikely" that contaminated food could trigger a clenbuterol test, and the court sided with them.

In 2000, CAS also rejected claims from swimmers David Meca-Medina and Igor Majcen that they tested positive for the banned substance nandrolone because for five consecutive days they ate a stew of meat and offal from uncastrated boars.

CAS counsel Jean-Philippe Dubey says he knows of no case, in its 26 years, where the court completely cleared an athlete who argued contamination by food or nutritional supplements.

Chinese athletes and a German table tennis player whose doping case is being heard by his federation this week also have blamed contaminated food for clenbuterol positives. Some of them hope that because of his wealth and high-profile, Contador will be able to successfully prove that food was to blame in his case and set a precedent that, in turn, might help clear their names.

But another case that an Italian anti-doping tribunal ruled on last week doesn't look good for Contador. Alessandro Colo was banned for one year even though the rider says the judges accepted his explanation that bad meat could explain his clenbuterol positive at the Tour of Mexico.

"I hired a lawyer and a biologist ... They couldn't go back and find the meat I'd eaten months earlier but they discovered official data that showed 18 percent of all the meat in Mexico is treated with clenbuterol," Colo told Cyclingnews.com. "The judges believed me but I've still been given a one-year ban because the rules only allow a 50 percent cut in suspensions. I don't think that is fair."

It's not encouraging for Contador, either.

CHANGE THE RULES: To help his case, Contador has hired an anti-doping expert who argues that very small traces of clenbuterol should not count as a positive test. That idea - in effect setting a threshold below which athletes would escape punishment - is gaining currency among some anti-doping scientists. They are concerned that detection methods for clenbuterol are now so precise that there is a small but increased risk of innocent athletes testing positive because of contaminated food. Clenbuterol findings reported worldwide jumped from an average of about 50 per year to 73 in 2008 and 67 in 2009, which the World Anti-Doping Agency believes "may be due to the increased sensitivity of the latest analytical techniques."

But others contend that cheats who abuse clenbuterol to bulk up muscles and lose fat would waltz through the loophole of a threshold. This debate could drag on far longer than Contador's case, even though it is fueling the argument.

"There is no threshold that you could set to say, 'Below it's contamination and above it's doping,"' says Christiane Ayotte, who heads Canada's anti-doping lab. "We'd be letting 60 dopers through."

She suggests that athletes simply need to be more careful. It's a legitimate question why Contador wasn't.

"I don't understand athletes who don't take care about what they eat," Ayotte says. "During the Tour de France, I would note down everything that I eat and keep samples of everything I ate if I eat differently from everyone else. I would be paranoid."

John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org.