N.B. This article was written before the 2019 Cross Country World Championships in Seefeld, Austria where on 27 February 2019 nine people were arrested, including five athletes, in an anti-doping investigation. One of the athletes was allegedly mid blood-transfusion when the police arrived on the scene.
Doping in Cycling
I love watch professional cycling and was hooked from the moment when I first saw it in 1989 and American Greg LeMond beat French Laurent Fignon by 9 seconds. I’ve watched every Tour de France since then, except between 1994-2000 when music took over as my main interest instead of sport.
”How clear can it be? I have never taken drugs” – Lance Armstrong, 2005.
But as we now know, the sport has had an endemic problem with doping, most infamous of all is, of course, Lance Armstrong, who was thrown out of the sport and had all his results annulled including his record-breaking seven back to back Tour de France wins between 1999-2006. But we also know that it was not just Armstrong, but essentially the entire sport – riders, managers and medical staff – who were in on the ”keep silent” conspiracy. Every single winner of the Tour de France over a 14 year period from 1996-2010 has either confessed to, or been sanctioned for, doping and the vast majority of the top three in those years have also had the same fate.
”Yes or no, did you take banned substances or blood dope in all seven of your Tour De France victories?”
”Yes.” – Lance Armstrong, 2013.
In simple terms, the dopers were far ahead of the testers, everyone in the sport- athletes, coaches, national federations, sponsors and even the regulatory bodies themselves- would suffer from bad publicity, so investigations were not willingly or thoroughly done. In short, the will to win was greater than that the will to tell the truth.
Cross Country Skiing
Since moving to Sweden in 2013 I have come to love cross country skiing, mainly as a TV event, but also as a enthusiastic, but clueless, participant in recreational skiing over winter.
Therefore it with great sadness that I say that I believe that cross country skiing is going through a similar phase to cycling, where performance enhancing drugs are part of the culture and mainstream practice in the sport.
Facts – the major benefits of Performance Enhancing Drugs in endurance sports
Like cycling, cross-country skiing is an extremely demanding sport, many say the most physically demanding sport in the world, where being in peak physical fitness at the right time of the season is the key to success or failure. It is primarily individual against individual, where chance factors associated with team sports like football are reduced to a minimum. It is simply a question of who is the strongest and fastest on race day.
It is, of course, this brutality of the sport that makes it an engaging spectacle of humanity fighting the elements and each other in a showdown who can suffer the most, for the longest time and cross the line first to win gold medals.
But this brutality also makes it a perfect sport to gain maximum benefit from using Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs). It is is truly the ”survival of the fittest” and the temptation to use modern science to extend what the body can normally tolerate is too great for many.
The enemy of tiredness and fatigue caused by enormous physical efforts can be effectively counteracted by manipulating your own blood giving greater endurance. For example, in the 1990s a new drug called EPO was developed. It gives you more red blood cells increasing your oxygen intake meaning you go for longer before tiredness kicks in. From 2000 onward another method became popular, blood doping. That is re-injecting your own fresh blood which you took out earlier in the season after a race. This effectively giving you back energy you had then instantly without the body needing time to recover and re-make red blood cells in it’s own time. This latter activity is extremely hard to detect because the athlete appears ”normal” in all urine or blood test. Cyclists who got caught blood doping did so because of mistakes by the doctors. In Floyd Landis‘ case the re-injected blood happened to contain another banned substance showing they did not keep good records of what they were doing. In the case of Tyler Hamilton he was re-injected with someone’s blood which also made him so ill that he was forced to retire from the race ”with stomach problems”.
Finland 2001 doping scandal
In 2001 at the World Championships a PED scandal was uncovered involving six members of the Finnish team, the most prominent of them Harri Kirvesniemi (holding gold medal, below) a national hero who had won medals at every single Olympics between 1980-1998. As was developed at the US Postal cycling team in the same era, this was a conscious, sophisticated and thoroughgoing doping program with every level of the team, from managers to athletes and doctors aware what was happening.
Doping at the Winter Olympics, 2002-2010
Cross country skiing was under the spotlight at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics when three athletes were all stripped of their medals for using an EPO-like drug. In total eight medals were removed from two female Russian athletes and a Spanish male competitor, Johann Mühlegg. They were the first, and so far only, Olympians to be removed of medals in cross country skiing since 1976.
When Mühlegg’s was stripped of his medal in the 30 km it was handed to Austrian, Christian Hoffmann (below) but both he and teammate, Mikhail Botvinov where also suspected of blood doping. Although cleared, three of their teammates were suspended. Later, in 2011, Hoffmann received a backdated ban nullifying results from 2003-2006.
The suspicion arose because doping products were found in the house where the Austrian team were staying leading to the suspension of manager, Walter Mayer.
However, four years later Mayer was seen with the Austrian team at the 2006 Turin Olympics and in a raid on their rooms doping products were again found. This lead to the lifetime ban of six Austrian skiers.
In Vancouver Winter Games 2010 two non-medalling cross country skiing were banned for doping, one from Poland and one from Russia.
So what we see is the same as in cycling over the same period – continuous doping offenses within the sport, complete team inclusion including doctors, managers and athletes, repeated doping despite bans and suspensions. In short, a doping epidemic across the entire sport.
2014 Sochi Games and the Russian doping scandal
At Sochi 2014 doping continued to affect the cross country skiing. Before we get to the Russians we also know that several cross country skiing athletes from other countries who did not medal were caught doping, including Austrian Johannes Dürr and Ukraine’s Marina Lisoger.
It is now considered as fact the Russian where involved in systematic doping and the entire team was banned from the Pyeongchang Olympics.
What Russian whistle blowers Juliya Stephanova and her husband, Vitaly Stephanov did for Summer Olympics, Grigory Rodchenkov has done for the Winter Olympics. Their testimonies make fascinating, if not, grim reading.
The Russians were caught doing exactly what the Finns and Austrians had already been doing and what has been commonplace in cycling- systematic team doping programmes.
The IOC’s own investigations, called the Oswald Commission, led to 46 Russian athletes who competed in the Sochi 2014 Olympics being banned for life, although this was reduced to 16 in February 2018.
Three suspensions upheld
In regard to cross country skiing, 12 skiers were initially banned, but after the February 2018 review this was reduced to three female Russian athletes who have been banned for life. Here are their names, the events they competed in at the Sochi Games and their track record in the FIS World Cup, the sport’s main competition.
Yulia Ivanova
10 km classic, 30 km freestyle, 4 x 5km cross country, Team sprint
3 World Cup individual podiums in 2012
Anastasia Dotsenko
1.5 km spirit, Team sprint
2 World Cup individual podiums in 2012
Yuliya Chekalyova
Skiathlon 7.5 x 7.5 mass start, 10 km Classic, 4 x 5 relay, 30 km freestyle
4 World Cup individual podiums, including one in 2012.
As there were only six women’s events and the skiing fraternity is very small, these three contestants actually took part in all the 2014 Olympic events for women between them. All three had track records as skiers would could potentially gain a medal place in the Games.
They can therefore act as a benchmark of the performance of an athlete who is being helped by performance enhancing drugs. We can say that there is a higher chance that those that beat them were also using PEDs than those who were behind them are less likely to have have doped. It is not definite, but more likely.
What is therefore shocking is that these three athletes did not perform very well at the Olympics at all and did not even nearly medal in any event. The best placed of them in any event was Chekalyova, who came 11th in the 10 km race, an event she had come second in just one month before the Sochi Olympics. In the two team events the women participated in they came sixth in both races.
Doped Russian athlete, Yulia Chekalyova only came 15th in this event, the women’s skiathlon at the Sochi Games in 2014.
That is to say doped Russian athletes who had reasonable medal hopes could not finish in the top 10 in any individual race and in the team events had five national teams above them.
Is the most realistic explanation that non-doped athletes performed better than Russian stars on their home turf or that the other athletes were also using PEDs and were better on the day?
The team relays are clear pointers to a culture of drugs across the sport in all nations. Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germans beat the Russians in both the women’s team events. Extra talent or also doped?
Outrageous Lies and Unlikely Excuses in Cycling
The lesson from cycling’s dark history is that athletes will go to absolutely any lengths to lie and cover up for drug use that they know they have participated in. There is simply not depths people will bot stoop to in order to hide the truth. This is for their own sake, the protection of teammates and the sport in general. It is a combination of pride and ”taking one for the team”, i.e. is the whole sporting fraternity.
As well as Armstrong we have, for example, his former teammate, Floyd Landis who, as mentioned, was banned after synthetic testosterone was found in his body in 2006. The lengths he went to deny this and claim it was occurred naturally are absolutely incredible. Especially when we now know he was lying at every single turn. Yet he continued to fight it in court for 2.5 years even developing a public fund for supporters to give voluntarily to pay for the huge American court costs he incurred.
From left to right: US Postal teammates-Tyler Hamilton, Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis.
We also have mentioned Tyler Hamilton was banned after having someone else’s blood in his blood stream in 2006. Also a former teammate of Armstrong, he still denied wrongdoing blaming the test department for contamination, even though he had already escaped a sanction for blood doping at the 2004 Olympics on a technicality. On returning to cycling after serving a two year ban he continued to dope and was banned for eight years after being caught again in 2009 for using prohibited substances.
Why did Landis and Hamilton repeatedly lie and go to court when they knew all along they were not telling the truth? It was all part of the facade to protect the cycling community from the outside world finding out the true story – ”The Secret Race” as Hamilton’s book title called it – that the sport was gripped by widespread and deep rooted performance enhancing drugs epidemic which they did not want anyone to know about.
Armstrong played his a big part in this conspiracy. Watching back interviews from before 2012 is truly a fascinating study into the human’s capacity to lie. He really had an incredible ability to repeatedly and convincingly deny the factual truth even under oath. But in the end former teammates Landis and Hamilton cracked first and their testimonies were crucial in the downfall of Armstrong after the publication of USADA’s Reasoned Decision in 2012.
Two other cyclists who received two year doping bans in unrelated incidents were Spaniard Albert Contador (2010) and Luxembourg’s Frank Schleck (2012). Both of the them had been on team’s managed by Johan Bruyneel, who was Armstrong’s team manager during all seven of his performance drug enhanced Tour de France victories.
The two of them came up with the same incredible, but I believe, unlikely reason, for the presence of banned substances in their urine sample, they had eaten contaminated food. Unlike Armstrong, Landis and Hamilton these two have never admitted to using performance enhancing drugs but were in any case given the full sanction for their error. Schleck retired from cycling but Contador came back to continue to have a successful career until he retired in 2018.
Doping sanctions in Norwegian Skiing in 2016
Norway and Russia are undoubtedly the two most dominant nations in cross country skiing at the moment. But they have not escaped the doping epidemic in the sport.
Therese Johaug is one of the best skiers in the world with an Olympic Gold from Vancouver 2010 and a Silver and Bronze from Sochi 2014 where she beat doped Russians Ivanova and Chelycheva. She has also won seven World Championship races, including three in one competition in Falun 2015.
But in 2016 Johaug was banned for two years for using a lip cream to treat sunburn whilst training in Italy. It just so happened that the cream contained steroids, a banned substance, and the doctor who gave it to her did not notice that the cream had a warning on the box that told users it contained doping products.
An additional fact of interest is that WADA, the international anti-doping federation, overturn the Norwegian’s own internal decision to suspend her for a year and half conveniently enabling her to appear at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. WADA gave her the full two year ban preventing her participation in the Games. This goes to show one of the weaknesses of internal testing – the high cost to yourself of telling the truth.
Norway’s medical doctors were again at fault in the doping case of Martin Johnsrud Sundby, who has won several Olympic medals including a bronze at Sochi. Like Johaug the case was also brought in 2016, strangely only taken up 1.5 years after the positive in-competition drugs test was taken. He tested positive for taking a too high dose of an asthma medicine in conjunction with winning the Tour de Ski. His doctors allegedly ”forgot” to apply for a dispensation, called a Therapeutic Use Exemption (a TUE), to allow Sundby to take his asthma medicine. This happened on two separate occasions during in competition testing approximately a month apart in December 2014 and January 2015. A very costly mistake by the medic, as Sundby lost both his Tour De Ski and the subsequent overall World Title he won that season as a result of his disqualification.
Sundby at a press conference in 2016
Lying doctors and misuse of Therapeutic Use Exemption
Whilst legal, TUE usage was repeatedly abused during the Armstrong era in cycling to cover up positive drug tests. For example, the American now admits, that his TUE for saddle sore cream in the 1999 Tour de France was falsified and backdated to hide steroid usage.
Does the story of saying you were using a steroid cream for treat a minor medical issue when a positive doping case arises sound familiar? Would a doctor fake reports or ”take one for the team” and say it was his fault to protect his athlete’s reputation? Yes, professional cycling between 1996-2010 has a never ending stream of examples of this and more.
When the unlikely is not the truth
So, simply put, I do not believe either Johaug or Sundby.
Are professional sports doctors this incompetent and so unaware of the damage to the careers and reputations of the stars, nations and sports they represent that they would forget to do things that would take less than three minutes to do? As an asthmatic Sundby must have a TUE for every single race of his career when he uses his medicine. It is an important piece of equipment as his skis. To forget it once is very unfortunate, twice is unthinkable. And it is just happened to coincide with a victory in one of the most prestigious competitions of the season.
Particularly, Johaug’s case smacks of complete unbelievably to me. In my experience lip balm is something that is a light covering on the mouth. Just how much did she put on to go over the did prohibitive substances limit? Did she accidentally eat the whole stick? Did she smear it on like peanut butter?
For me, these two incident lack credibility, especially because the recent history of cycling shows that the truth is often in short supply in the cut-throat world of winner-takes-all professional sport where a accusation of doping puts people into full defense mode.
SVT 2018
In the course of my research for this article I came across a report that I was completely unaware of when I started my writing which, if true, confirms my theory.
In February 2018, just before the Pyeongchang Olympics, Swedish TV aired a programme as part of its Uppdrag Granskning series which evaluated 10,000 blood samples from 2000 professional skiers between 2001-2010. The program claimed that 41% of medal winners between 2001-2017 have, at least once in their career, had irregular test results. The program highlights in particular one unnamed active Swedish skier who they suggest is 99.9% certain to be blood doping.
Conclusion
Like cycling, cross country skiing is a sport that is highly physically demanding and use of performance enhancing drugs can make a great difference. Between 2001 and 2018 nations have been found to consciously break the rules to gain an unfair advantage for their athletes, even at prestigious events like the Olympics. When accused of doping, like cyclists on the US Postal Team now known to have doped, there is total flat denial and excuses made which have more than a hint of unreality about them. Not only this, but a whole raft of active women skiers have performed significantly better than capable Russian athletes whom we know to have doped. Can we be certain these better results are not also drug enhanced?
All this leads me to believe that cross country skiing has a large scale doping program across the combatants. There may be bleak times ahead for the sport, as one thing cycling has taught us is – eventually the truth catches up with you.
Sources
Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Commission
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuliya_Ivanova_(cross-country_skier)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuliya_Chekalyova
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasia_Dotsenko
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Rodchenkov
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Johnsrud_Sundby
https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopningsskandalen_i_Lahtis_2001
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIS_Nordic_World_Ski_Championships_2001
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harri_Kirvesniemi
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_medals
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therese_Johaug
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Landis_doping_case
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Hamilton
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mayer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Olympic_Games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A4nk_Schleck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Contador
Others
https://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet/a/G1eJ9J/sundbys-tarar-efter-dopningsdomen
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/13/sports/olympics-finland-reels-over-skiers-drug-scandal.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/sports/cycling/18cycle.html
https://www.svt.se/dox/nar-hjaltarna-ljuger
https://www.bbc.com/sport/winter-olympics/25636597
https://www.newsinenglish.no/2016/10/13/johaug-crushed-by-new-violation/
A Brit On Thin Ice 
Ett svar på ”Why I believe Cross Country Skiing has a systematic doping problem”
I personally believe Norway has had an active doping program since the 80’s, it’s just not plausible that a very small nation can utterly dominate a sport for so long against others who are known to have doped and not doped themselves.
I’ve been married to a Norwegian since 2004. I’ve never been able to make sense of it, Norwegians refuse to talk about it.
GillaGilla