Only 10 days after Sir Dave Brailsford revealed his vision for the next five years at Team Sky an unwelcome spectre from the past cropped up again when the team’s former doctor Geert Leinders was given a life ban by anti-doping agencies for a hefty string of infringements relating to the period before he joined Sky.
There have never been any allegations of improper practice relating to Leinders’s spell at Sky in 2011 and 2012, but the 42-page arbitration ruling on the doctor’s time at the Dutch Rabobank team from 2002-09 was detailed and damning.
The case was based principally on the testimony of two former Rabobank riders, the Dane Michael Rasmussen and Levi Leipheimer of the US, who revealed Leinders’s role in doping when questioned by the US anti-doping agency in connection with Lance Armstrong in 2012. Leipheimer and Rasmussen received reduced bans for co-operation with the inquiring agencies, Usada and the Danish and Dutch equivalents. Testimony from four unnamed cyclists at Rabobank was also cited.
Leinders, who had been a board member at the Rabobank team as well as their doctor, was charged by Usada and the others in 2013 with possession, trafficking and administering banned substances including the blood-booster erythropoietin, testosterone, insulin, DHEA and corticosteroids; with administering blood transfusions, and with covering up anti-doping violations. An arbitration hearing took place in August 2014 at which the doctor, who denied the claims, was not present.
Commenting on the decision, Usada’s chief executive, Travis Tygart, said: “It shocks the conscience that a board member and team doctor would abuse his trusted position by overseeing and participating in this type of dangerous and fraudulent activity. As we said from the beginning of our cycling investigation, ridding those in the system who attempt to justify doping as a means to an end is the only way to truly clean up cycling for current and future generations of athletes.”
Rasmussen – who was thrown off the Tour de France in 2007 because of disparities in the information he gave over his whereabouts for out-of-competition testing – claimed that Leinders assisted him with blood transfusions during the 2004 and 2005 Tours de France and the 2007 Giro d’Italia, that Leinders wrote false medical certificates to enable him to use cortisone, and that the doctor helped him dope with insulin.
Leipheimer said that Leinders had helped him dope with EPO at the 2002 and 2003 Tours de France. Both athletes alleged that Leinders had recommended they attempt blood transfusions using the blood of family members.
Leinders worked for Sky on a consultancy basis in 2011 and 2012, having been hired in October 2010, after the team amended its publicly stated policy of not recruiting doctors with experience of professional cycling in an attempt to make a clean break with cycling’s doping past. The policy was rethought, Sir Dave Brailsford later explained, after the death from a blood infection of a team carer, Txema González, during that year’s Vuelta.
Leinders was given a contract for up to 80 days’ work for Sky after being interviewed by the team’s head of medical, the psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters. He put in 67 days at the team in 2011.
In 2012 he worked for Sky for 44 days before a former director at Rabobank told the press there had been a doping programme at Rabobank and Leinders had been part of it. Sky mounted an internal inquiry to assess Leinders and the doctor’s contract at Sky was not renewed at the end of the year.
“We welcome this decision which relates to Dr Leinders’ time at Rabobank,” a Team Sky spokesman told the website cyclingnews.com. “As is well known Dr Leinders did work at Team Sky on a freelance basis for a short period.
“Although nothing improper happened during his time at Team Sky we have acknowledged many times that it was a mistake to hire him. We would never have done so had we had any suspicions or knowledge of his past and we have reviewed our recruitment processes and checks as a result.”