Austrian police files suggest skier Andrus Veerpalu might have been doping back in 2009
While the public is more familiar with cross-country skier Andrus Veerpalu's growth hormone scandal in 2011, official investigation files from the Austrian criminal police point to suspicions that his gold medal from the 2009 World Championship was also aided by blood doping.
Following the doping scandal that erupted at the 2019 Seefeld World Championships, former sports agent Stefan Matschiner, who was convicted in doping-related crimes and mediated blood doping in the late 2000s, contacted Austrian police, Eesti Ekspress writes.
In his testimony, Matschiner claimed, among other things, that Andrus Veerpalu was a personal acquaintance and that he assisted Veerpalu with blood doping shortly before the skier won the final world championship title of his career in the men's 15-kilometer classical individual start race.
However, because the Austrian was not directly connected to Team Haanja in the Seefeld case, he was not called to testify at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) proceedings in 2021. For largely the same reasons, the testimony was also absent from the files of the Estonian court case against Mati Alaver and from Veerpalu's own criminal case in Austria.
As a result, the information had not previously reached the wider public. Before the arbitration hearing, however, Veerpalu was given an opportunity to submit his position on Matschiner's claims in writing. According to the skiing legend, he does not know the former owner of Mark Schmidt's blood-doping equipment. Therefore, Veerpalu argued, Matschiner's claims that he assisted him with blood doping cannot possibly be true.
The case reached its official legal conclusion in November 2024 when Veerpalu was summoned to court in Innsbruck where prosecutors offered him a settlement that required the Estonian to pay a €700 fine. Veerpalu agreed to the deal.
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Editor: Siim Boikov, Marcus Turovski
Source: Eesti Ekspress
