The UCI announced on Monday it has provisionally suspended Franck Bonnamour (Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale) for ‘unexplained abnormalities’ in his biological passport.
Bonnamour, 28, started the 2024 season in Australia at the Tour Down Under.
The press release gave no specifics on what aspect of the biological passport in which Bonnamour’s values deviated from the norm. His ADRV is listed as “Use of Prohibited Methods and/or Prohibited Substances”.
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale issued a statement that read, “This decision is based on checks carried out before his arrival in the team on January 1, 2023.”
Bonnamour transferred to the team from B&B Hotels after the 2022 season.
“In this context and as long as the UCI procedure is ongoing, the team is suspending Franck Bonnamour as a precautionary measure with immediate effect,” the team continued.
The UCI instituted the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) in 2008 as a way to detect blood doping as direct tests for boosters such as EPO were only effective in a short window of time.
Since then, modules to measure markers that can detect the use of anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing hormones have been added to the panel.
Before today’s announcement, there have been no WorldTour pros snagged with the ABP in a decade. The most recent cases have come at the ProTeam level.
In 2022, seven riders from the W52-FC Porto team were suspended for various doping offences. One of them, João Rodrigues, was given a four-year ban for ABP violations in the case.
Before him, compatriot Domingos Gonçalves was given a four-year ban for ABP violations in 2019, and in the same year, Operation Aderlass uncovered a blood-doping ring that led to bans for Bjorn Thurau, Georg Preidler, Stefan Denifl, Borut Bozic, Kristian Koren, Primin Lang and Kristijan Durasek, all except one of which had shown no abnormalities in their ABP, possibly due to tests not showing the effects of smaller, more frequent doses of EPO employed in a process called ‘microdosing’.
The case led many to question the effectiveness of the ABP.
In 2021, the UCI transferred its anti-doping controls to an independent body, the International Testing Agency, a move that drew criticism from the previous responsible body, the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation (CADF), as coming without input from cycling’s stakeholders.
A study published in 2021 by researchers at the French anti-doping laboratory (AFLD) in Châtenay-Malabry claimed to be able to detect microdoses in blood and urine up…
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