Italian anti-doping expert alleges Banesto paid doctor "high amounts".

While rarely being mentioned in the many doping scandals that have repeatedly haunted the sport of cycling throughout the years, Miguel Indurain is the latest manifold Tour de France winner to be connected to a doping shame. Greatly esteemed Italian anti-doping expert, Sandro Donati, claims to have verification that Indurain and his Banesto team worked with the infamous Dr. Francesco Conconi during the nineties. There was, though, no definite proof of what service the payments were made for. Donati, who now works as a researcher with the World Anti-Doping Agency, has told Dutch Nederlandse Omroep Stichting that Conconi “had contracts with Banesto for high amounts” it says on the newspaper’s website Nos.nl

Erwin Nijboer, a Dutch rider on the Banesto payroll at the time, corroborated the contact with the doctor, but said that it “was only to carry out the Conconi test.”

Donati rejects this statement outright. “I find it difficult to believe that Banesto paid that much to have the riders tested.” The story was verified by Dutch journalist Ludo van Klooster, who told Nos.nl that he saw the Banesto bus at the University of Ferrara, where Conconi worked. “I saw the entire team. Also Indurain. And Erwin Nijboer.”

Conconi is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern sports physiology. He constructed the Conconi test to compute aerobic threshold and taught sports science to a series of sports doctors who went on to to work in cycling, including the equally reviled Dr. Michele Ferrari, who cooperated closely with Lance Armstrong for a number of years, and Dr. Luigi Cecchini.