It was news to me when I saw in a footnote in the sports pages that Alberto Contador had failed a drug test this summer. It was news, of course, but I suppose no surprise: Contador had it coming.
It’s getting harder and harder to love the sport of cycling because too often it’s the sport of doping.
Wow, you’re just now hearing about that? It’s quite a bit more complicated than just “failed a drug test”. They first found a very small amount of a banned steroid in his blood. He blamed contaminated meat, but when they tested a second time, what they found was traces of plastic. The speculation I’ve seen is that what he was actually doing was transfusions of his own blood (therefore the plastic) and the steroid was in there not because he was taking steroids during the tour, but rather he was taking them when he first had the blood drawn that was later used for the transfusion (or within a few days before that). As far as I know, blood transfusions like that are also illegal on the tour, but as you might suspect, they’re much harder to detect.