Cycling: a year in prison suspended required against a former doctor of the Quintana brothers

One year in suspended prison sentence and 5,000 euros fine were required on Monday by the Marseille prosecutor’s office against Fredy Gonzales Torres, the Colombian doctor suspected of having helped the Nairo and Dayer Quintana brothers doped during the Tour de France 2020.

Winner of the Tour of Italy in 2014 and the Tour of Spain in 2016, three times on the podium of the Tour de France, Nairo Quintana then ran for the French training Arkéa-Samsic.

Equipment and drugs entered during two searches in 2020

The Colombian doctor was tried there for “holding a substance or method prohibited for use by a sportsman without medical justification, in this case equipment, tools, products and devices to implement infusions and/or intravenous injections”, as well as for having administered them “without medical justification” to the Quintana brothers.

Believing that we were in this file “beyond the beam of clues”, the prosecutor Marion Chabot asked against Fredy Gonzales “a year of suspended imprisonment, 5,000 euros fine and a ban for five years to exercise any activity related to a sports body”.

After having without success deposited requests for nullity of the procedure, the defendant’s lawyer, Me Mohamed El Yousfi, recalled that “no doping product” had “never been seized” in this case and pleaded the release. The judgment was deliberated on April 2.

In 2022, Nairo Quintana had been disqualified from the Tour de France, of which he had taken sixth place, after the discovery in his blood of traces of Tramadol, a painkiller prohibited by the medical regulations. At 35, he runs today for the Spanish team Movistar.