Finnish Ski Association on doping claims: skiers were offered baking powder

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The commercial Finnish television channel Nelonen’s news programme Nelosen Uutiset has claimed that Pekka Vähäsöyrinki, a long-time leader of coaching within the Finnish Ski Association (FSA), made inquiries about women skiers’ willingness to use doping.
     
What was talked about was nothing more than baking powder, was the FSA’s Wednesday reply to the Ministry of Education.
      In its response to the doping claims by Nelosen Uutiset, the FSA says that Vähäsöyrinki, the former head coach and director of cross-country skiing, had conversations with skiers over the use of bicarbonate of soda, in other words baking powder, to block the formation of lactic acid in the muscles.
      “Someone may have been misinterpreted these conversations and mistaken the discussed method as forbidden”, the Ski Association writes.
     
According to the FSA, baking powder was indeed the Finnish skiers’ secret weapon in the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville.
      In its investigation into the matter, the FSA failed to find anything that would have supported Nelonen’s accusations. In April Nelonen claimed in its newscast that based on a tip from an anonymous source the use of doping and covering it up was systematic within the FSA in the 1990s.
      The channel also said that during a 1988 training camp in Sodankylä, a bottle containing EPO hormone was spotted on the table of skier Marjo Matikainen.
     
This piece of information the FSA denies as unbelievable. According to the association, the news of the use of EPO among endurance athletes only emerged in the 1990s.
      The FSA backs its claims by referring to Tapio Videman’s skiers’ blood count study, according to which the skiers’ haemoglobin values in the late 1980s were below the national average. According to the study, only around 1994 did the skiers’ Hb-readings start rising steeply.
     
The FSA also failed to find evidence to support the claims that an FSA worker would have moved a stash of doping agents to a new location in January 1998, after the Finnish News Agency (STT) alleged that skier Jari Räsänen had used growth hormone.
      In court STT failed to produce evidence to support its accusations, and editor-in-chief Kari Väisänen and the journalist who wrote the article were convicted of public defamation.
      “None of the information that we have come across supports this accusation, or someone is lying”, reads the FSA account, signed by managing director Jari Piirainen.
      Piirainen says that he has discussed the issue with the cross-country skiing core personnel of the time, including Pekka Vähäsöyrinki, Antti Leppävuori and Pirkka Mäkelä. Piirainen failed to reached Kari-Pekka Kyrö, the cross-country head coach during the disastrous 2001 World Championships in Lahti, where six Finnish skiers were caught for using a plasma expander and received two-year competition bans.
     
To add insult to injury, the Finnish commercial television channel MTV3 reported in its Thursday Tulosruutu sports newscast that the use of blood doping was indeed very common among top skiers in the 1990s. According to a research report obtained by Tulosruutu, even in Lahti 2001, half of the medallists (from all countries) had manipulated their blood.
      As early as in 2003, Helsingin Sanomat reported on the same study, according to which nearly half of the skiers had abnormal blood counts. Ten top skiers had what were described as “extremely abnormal” blood counts, which strongly hinted at the use of blood doping, but did not attest to it one hundred per cent.
      The study was conducted during the games by Jim Stray-Gundersen, Tapio Videman, Ilkka Penttilä, and Inggard Lereim, and at the time it was published in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.
      Nelosen Uutiset have already condemned the Ski Association’s baking powder explanation, given to the Minister of Culture and Sport Stefan Wallin (Swedish People’s Party), as ridiculous and patronising in the extreme.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  TV channel Nelonen: Finnish Ski Association covered up widespread doping in 1990s (23.4.2008)

Helsingin Sanomat