A joint Austrian and German probe into a blood-doping ring linked to a German doctor has widened to 21 athletes from eight countries across five sports. Some of the suspects do not yet know they've been identified.
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Investigators have uncovered a German doctor's client list of 21 athletes from Europe, Korea and the US suspected of blood-doping across five sports, Munich prosecutor Kai Gräber said Wednesday.
The ring is believed to have been run out of Germany and allegedly involved boosting the red blood cell count of the athletes from Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Croatia, Slovenia, South Korea and the US.
Prosecutors did not identify those accused, but the Nordic skiers and cyclists arrested in Austria have already confessed and have been suspended from competition. The doping is alleged to have taken place since 2011 and incorporates both summer and winter sports.
Some of the athletes did not yet know they had been identified as investigations were still in progress, prosecutors said.
Unsafe medical practice
Mark S. was said to have received between 4,000 and 12,000 euros ($4,500-$13,600) per client each season to extract and freeze their performance-boosting red blood cells and re-inject them shortly before competition. The body naturally replaces blood that is removed, so reinserting more before competing then gives the athlete an abnormally high quantity of (clean) blood during an event, meaning they have an advantage but do not fail a urine test for banned substances.
Investigators found that the transfusions were carried out by assistants without medical training in unsanitary conditions, thawing frozen blood bags in sinks of water rather than carefully warming them using proper equipment.
Prosecutor Gräber said that two of the suspects had an extra liter of blood injected before flying to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics last year.
"That is definitely not proper medical practice," Gräber said.
Public confessions
The probe and subsequent raids were triggered when Austrian cross-country skier Johannes Dürr admitted to doping in an interview with German broadcaster ARD, resulting in his arrest on March 5.
Since the arrests other Austrian athletes have been implicated, among them cyclist Georg Preidler, who told police he had attempted doping.
ta/msh (dpa, Reuters, SID)
The most unusual cases in sports doping history
Doping bans are an increasingly common feature of elite sports. Many involve obscure performance-enhancing drugs but some are a little different. Whether it's toothpaste, egg whites or tea, here are a few strange ones.
Image: AP
Tainted tea
Peru captain and former Bayern Munich and Hamburg forward Paolo Guerrero will miss the World Cup in Russia. He was recently handed a one-year ban after he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, including cocaine. Guerrero claims he's innocent and that the result stemmed from a tea he was taking to offset flu symptoms, which was contaminated.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/R. Abd
Tampered toothpaste
Dieter Baumann, German 5000-meter Olympic champion of 1992, later tested positive for nandrolone and was banned for two years in 1999, causing him to miss the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He argued that someone had contaminated his toothpaste. He came back in 2002, at the age of 37, to win silver over 10,000 meters at the European Championships in Munich.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Ban turned business opportunity
Canada's Ross Rebagliati was the first snowboarding gold medallist in Olympic history. Hours after his win at 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, he was disqualified after THC - the active ingredient in cannabis - was found in his system. The decision was later overturned. Regbagliati insisted that the positive test was the result of second-hand smoke, but in 2013 he started a medical-marijuana business.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/D. Karmann
Early daze
In the first known doping incident, coaches pumped a dangerous mix of strychnine and pure egg whites into American runner Thomas Hicks before his marathon at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. In the absence of guidelines at the time, he was declared the winner of the race - even after collapsing at the finishing line and hallucinating for hours.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
A novel excuse
Dennis Mitchell (second from right) won Olympic relay gold for the USA at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Six years later, tests found he had illegally high levels of testosterone. His claims that he'd had "five bottles of beer and sex with his wife at least four times" was, somewhat surprisingly, accepted by the US Track and Field authorities, but not by the IAAF.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S.Simon
A heavy price
Highly-decorated Norwegian skiier Therese Johaug tested positive for an anabolic steriod last year and claimed that this was caused by the application of a lip balm. She received an 18-month ban that will rule her out of the Winter Olympics in February. The team doctor who gave her the balm resigned soon after.
Image: Getty Images/Bongarts/A. Hassenstein
The staged accident
Ekaterini Thanou and her training partner Konstantinos Kenteris failed to attend a drugs test on the eve of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics. Later that day they were hospitalized, claiming they’d had a motorcycle accident. They withdrew from the Games, and investigators ruled the accident had been staged and they were criminally charged with making false statements to authorities.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
State culpability
Born as Heidi, Krieger was a female shot putter for East Germany at the height of the Cold War. Communist officials fed Krieger with staggering amounts of steroids, altering her appearance. Krieger began to publicly identify as transgender and later opted to have gender reassignment surgery, becoming Andreas.
Image: Montage: picture-alliance/dpa/DW
Spinning a web of trouble
Australian cricketer Shane Warne, widely considered one of the greatest to have played the game, received a one-year ban in 2003, missing the Cricket World Cup after testing positive for a diuretic. Warne said his mother had given him a substance to help "get rid of his double chin" when he struggled with weight issues.