According to reports published on cycling news today, 5-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain and his Banesto team worked with Dr. Francesco Conconi in the nineties.

Cycling News wrote today that highly respected Italian anti-doping expert Sandro Donati claims to have evidence that Indurain and his Banesto team worked with Dr. Francesco Conconi in the nineties. Donati told nos.nl that Conconi “had contracts with Banesto for high amounts.” (Sandro Donati now works as a researcher with the WADA – World Anti-Doping Agency)

Miguel Indurain
Is Miguel Indurain the latest in doping scandal?

Indurain and Conconi

Miguel Indurain (born 16 July 1964) won five consecutive Tour de France from 1991 to 1995, the fourth to win five times.After Lance Armstrong lost his all seven Tour de France titles, he became the only 5-time consecutive winner of the Tour in history. He also won the Giro d’Italia twice, becoming one of only seven people in history to achieve the Giro Tour double in the same season. He wore the race leader’s yellow jersey in the Tour de France for 60 days.

Indurain nicknamed “Miguelón” or “Big Mig”, because of his ability and physical size: 1.88 m (6 ft 2 in) and 80 kg (176 lbs).

Francesco Conconi (born April 19, 1935 in Como, Italy) is an Italian sports doctor and scientist, with disciples such as life-time banned Dr. Michele Ferrari and Luigi Cecchini.

Conconi is a Professor at the University of Ferrara in Italy where he heads the Centro Studi Biomedici Applicati allo Sport or Biomedical Research Institute. His research focused on tracing techniques for doping substances but he is better known for his doping activities and is said to have introduced Erythropoietin or EPO to the sport of cycling.

Professor Conconi is most famous for having prepared Francesco Moser for his successful attempt to break the world hour record in Mexico, 1984 (at that time, EPO was not a banned substance, EPO has been banned since the early 1990s). This preparation included blood doping, as Moser would later admit (Blood doping was banned by the IOC-International Olympic Committee in 1985, though no test existed for it at the time).

Other Conconi clients included Maurizio Fondriest (1988 UCI Road World Champion, 1991 and 1993 UCI Road World Cup winner), Ivan Gotti (twice Giro d’Italia winner-1997 and 1999), Piotr Ugrumov (twice Tour de France stage winner in 1994), Claudio Chiappucci (multiple Tour de France and Giro d’Italia stage winner and won KOM jersey in both grand tours), Mario Cipollini (2002 UCI Road World Champion, multiple Grand Tour stage winner-12 stages in Tour de France, 42 stages in Giro d’Italia-Giro record, and 3 stages in Vuelta a España), and the late Laurent Fignon (twice Tour de France winner-1983, 1984 and Giro d’Italia winner-1989).

M. Özgür Nevres

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  1. Big Mig is one of my favorite cyclists. Did he dope? Likely. Do I care? No. Why? If you were winning in that era you were likely juicing. It was so prevalent that cheating became, IMO, part of competing; that is, no juice, no success. It doesn’t make sense to be critical of racers of the era, strip titles, or other nonsense. The competitors still had to put in the hard work. Doping was part of what it took to be among the best. Think about it: Armstrong’s jerseys were stripped, but to whom would you award them. Weren’t many if not all of the top 10 in those tours somewhat connected with or confirmed to have doped? And what about the domestiques who had to grind hours at tempo? When did doping start, how prevalent was it, and how much of it is still going on? Yes, it’s a shame doping was a part of the sport, however, it was. Now that the sport is more clean, it makes sense to have measures in place to control doping. As for the past, questioning or making examples of those athletes who admitted to or were confirmed to have doped is a waste of time.

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