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Italian newspaper reports drug scandal
Posted: Monday December 27, 1999 05:26 PM
ROME (Reuters) -- Italian sport faced the prospect of a fresh drugs scandal on Monday after a national newspaper published the names of 22 top athletes who it claimed took part in an extensive blood doping program. The list, in Rome-based daily la Repubblica, included cyclists Gianni Bugno, Claudio Chiappucci, Maurizio Fondriest and Rolf Sorensen plus all four members of the Italian Nordic skiing team which took the gold medal in the 4x10 km relay at the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer. The paper claimed the athletes took the banned hormone erythropoetin (EPO) in the early 1990s under the guidance of a professor at the University of Ferrara in northern Italy. It said the professor, Francesco Conconi, had claimed the program was part of legitimate research into the effects of blood-enhancing EPO on amateur athletes. Conconi denied the paper's allegations in a statement issued by his lawyers. "Our client has for several months been the subject of a continuous defamatory campaign which has reached a peak with the article which appeared in la Repubblica," the statement said. "Professor Conconi denies in the strongest possible manner the accusations made in the article which, among other things, constitute the umpteenth violation of his right to privacy." Some of the athletes named also dismissed the allegations. "I have never worked with Conconi. I don't think the professor could ever claim to have been my doctor," said Chiappucci, who was forced to sit out the 1997 Giro d'Italia cycle race after recording a hematocrit level above the 50 percent allowed by the International Cycling Union. "These names don't mean anything," he added. Marco Albarello, one of Italy's gold medal winners at Lillehammer, said: "My sporting career lasted 20 years, 15 of them at the highest level. I don't know if I'd have been able to do that if I'd have been using illegal substances, as I'm regularly accused of doing." The Italian Olympic Committee (CONI), which oversees sport in the country, said the head of its anti-doping commission Giacomo Aiello spoke to the magistrate investigating Conconi on Monday following the publication of the article. It gave no further details. La Repubblica said the list was part of a cache of computer files seized by a magistrate investigating Conconi, head of the university's research center for applied biomedecine in sport. Italian soccer and CONI were rocked by a doping scandal a year ago involving the use of the muscle-building amino acid creatine, which occurs naturally in the body and which is not a banned substance. The scandal led to the resignation of CONI's president and the head of the anti-doping panel and the closure of CONI's main Rome laboratory.
Copyright 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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