The Colombian doctor of Nairo and Dayer Quintana, suspected of having helped his two compatriots do drugs during the 2020 Tour de France, while they were racing for Arkéa-Samsic, will be tried in Marseille on September 2, the prosecution said, confirming the information from the Telegram. At the end of September 2020, when the Tour had just ended, a preliminary investigation targeting several riders of the Breton team and members of the medical staff for suspicion of doping was opened by the public health center of the Marseille prosecutor’s office.
It followed the discovery, during a search carried out during the 17th stage, in Méribel (Savoie), of drugs and a “method that could be described as doping”, in the words of the Marseille prosecutor of the at the time, Dominique Laurens. “The investigation is closed and it has been decided to prosecute Mr. Fredy Alexander Gonzales Torres, the Colombian doctor of the sports team,” the Marseille prosecutor’s office confirmed to AFP on Tuesday.
The doctor will be judged on September 2 by the Marseille criminal court for “possession of a substance or method prohibited for use by an athlete without medical justification, in this case equipment, tools, products and devices allowing implementing infusions and/or intravenous injections,” according to the Marseille prosecutor’s office.
Fredy Alexander Gonzales Torres is also referred to court for having administered on September 16, 2020 to Colombians Nairo and Dayer Quintana, “without medical justification”, a “substance or method prohibited in the context of a sporting event”, via the equipment and products already mentioned, specifies the same source. The maximum penalty incurred by the caregiver is five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros.
“No doping substance has ever been found (…). I have nothing to hide and have never had anything to hide,” climber Nairo Quintana, then leader of the Arkéa-Samsic team, who had completed the 2020 big loop in the anonymity, in a poor 17th place, more than an hour from the winner, the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar.
Nairo Quintana, 33, who is coming out of a white season following his disqualification at the end of the 2022 Tour de France, bounced back at the end of 2023 by joining his former Spanish team Movistar, with whom he won the 2014 Giro and the 2016 Vuelta. Quintana was disqualified from the 2022 Tour, in which he took 6th place, after the discovery in his blood of traces of tramadol, a painkiller prohibited by medical regulations.
