An interesting story looks to be developing in Finland as the Finish skiing doping scandal of years past explodes with conspiracy. In an interview with the former head coach of the Finish cross country ski team over the weekend, the money for doping silence scheme came up (to the Helsingin Sanomat) :
The former head coach of Finland’s cross-country skiing team Kari-Pekka Kyrö has further stirred the pot over the presence of doping in the sport with revelations made to an MTV3 sports programme on Sunday.
Kyrö claimed to the broadcaster that Jari Isometsä - the first Finnish skier to be exposed at the Lahti Nordic Sking World Championships in 2001 - would have been promised a million markka (roughly EUR 160,000) for taking the burden of scapegoat on his shoulders and keeping quiet about the matter.
According to Kyrö, he and the then cross-country skiing boss Antti Leppävuori had been putting together a document to this effect, known at the time as “the sauna contract”, and Kyrö charges that that the Finnish Ski Association’s then Chairman Paavo M. Petäjä and Managing Director Esa Klinga were aware of the paper.
The 'sauna contract' sounds pretty steamy.
At the press conference immediately after his positive test, Isometsä announced he was solely responsible for what had happened.
The plan of a possible seven-figure compensation for his silence went seriously awry when five other high-profile Finnish athletes tested positive in the next few days.
Minister for Sport Stefan Wallin (Swedish People’s Party) commented late on Sunday night on Kyrö’s claims.
“The charge that the FSA would have tried to cover up the 2001 doping scandal in Lahti with money is an extremely serious one. I would regard it as shocking in the extreme if an association enjoying considerable state support were to have tried to paper over its cheating with money”, said Wallin.
The minister also repeated the often-made demand that the then leadership of the FSA should step forward and tell the full truth about what happened in Lahti.
The present FSA Chairman Jaakko Holkeri described the current situation as “hellish”, as new and different claims keep rising to the surface.
The Finish doping scandal extends back to world class skiers over the years, with a Lance Armstrong type situation:
Holkeri had no position within the FSA leadership during the World Championships in Lahti, which were a fiasco for Finland as six leading skiers received two-year bans for the use of a banned plasma expander.
On Saturday, Kyrö had repeated his earlier assertion that female skier Marjo Matikainen-Kallström, a multiple Olympic and World Championships medallist in the 1980s, had used the performance-enhancing hormone erythropoietin or EPO.
The Norwegian doping expert Ingard Lereim reported that in tests carried out intensively by the International Ski Federation (FIS) there were no indications, for example through raised haemoglobin levels, of Matikainen-Kallström’s having used EPO or any other form of blood doping.
As with most successful skiers, Matikainen-Kallström was tested very thoroughly.
Lereim, who was a long-time member of the FIS medical committee, noted that the Finnish skier had actually demanded that she be tested more rigorously than the norm in order to avoid later claims that she was "on something".
I was at a competition in Finland just before Lahti and remember commenting clearly to my colleagues that the performance of the Finnish team was inhuman. It is impossible in a closed society like Finland for more people not to have known what was going on. The revelations almost certainly still have a long way to go.
Posted by: Glen Grant | 10/16/2008 at 09:07
I was at a competition in Finland just before Lahti and remember commenting clearly to my colleagues that the performance of the Finnish team was inhuman. It is impossible in a closed society like Finland for more people not to have known what was going on. The revelations almost certainly still have a long way to go.
Posted by: Glen Grant | 10/16/2008 at 09:08