Olympic speedskater Claudia Pechstein’s 2-year doping ban upheld, will miss Vancouver Games

Olympic speedskater Pechstein’s 2-year ban upheld

FRANKFURT — Five-time Olympic speedskating champion Claudia Pechstein lost her appeal against a two-year ban for blood doping Wednesday and will miss the Vancouver Games.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, dismissed the German’s appeal against a ban imposed by the International Skating Union. The verdict was first released by Pechstein’s management group in Berlin and later confirmed by the court.

The ban runs until February 2011.

The 37-year-old Pechstein will miss the Vancouver Olympics in February, where she had hoped to win a gold medal for the fifth straight games. Pechstein is Germany’s most successful Winter Olympian with a total of nine medals. She is also a six-time world champion.

She has never failed a drug test and denied doping. But the ISU said she returned blood samples with abnormal levels at the World Allround Championships last season.

In ruling on Pechstein’s appeal, the three-man CAS panel said abnormalities in Pechstein’s blood profile “could not be reasonably explained by the various justifications submitted by the athlete nor by a congenital medical condition … and concluded that there were no signs of any detectable blood disease or anomaly.”

“The panel finds that they must, therefore, derive from the athlete’s illicit manipulation of her own blood, which remains the only reasonable alternative source of such abnormal values.”

Pechstein lawyer Simon Bergmann, who was given the 66-page CAS ruling ahead of its publication, said he would take Pechstein’s case to the Swiss supreme court.

“It’s incredibly hard for me to accept it (the verdict),” Pechstein said in a statement released by her management group. “After weeks of unworthy comings and goings the verdict was predictable. I am not shocked by the outcome but more by how it came about.”

Pechstein also blasted both the ISU and CAS.

“It remains unimaginable for me how I could get banned for one single indication that is also very contested scientifically,” Pechstein said.

Pechstein won her first Olympic gold medal in the 5,000-meter race in Lillehammer in 1994, and took the same distance in Nagano in 1998 and Salt Lake City in 2002. She also won the 3,000 in Salt Lake City, and was part of Germany’s winning team in the pursuit in Turin in 2006.

She also won two Olympic silvers and two bronze medals in her career, including a third-place finish in the 5,000 at the 1992 Albertville Games.

Thomas Bach, Germany’s top Olympic official and a vice president of the International Olympic Committee, said the verdict was a victory in the fight against doping.

“Every doping case is a disappointment but it shows that the control system functions,” he said.

Clemens Prokop, president of the German athletics federation, said the “quality of the fight against doping” would be “noticeably improved” by the ruling.

“It will not only be based on controls, but on the sum of facts,” he said.