EXCLUSIVE: Doping is rife in football - Memo Hernandez

One-time supplier to the stars says top footballers use undetectable drugs with impunity - and no one really wants to stop them.

May 2017

‘Listen, it’s very, very common for footballers to dope,’ Angel Hernandez, one time doper to the stars, says casually. ‘The fact is football is really dirty.’

Hernandez, who talks to me by telephone from Florida, now works as a boxing coach. But for a decade from the mid-nineties he was sport’s leading illicit chemist, providing undetectable super-stimulants and advice to a wide range of household name athletes. The 2005 FBI investigation into doping that sent three-time Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones to prison put an end to Hernandez’s illegal activities, he says. He was made State Witness A in return for immunity from prosecution. Since then, he claims, he has been clean.

He points out footballers are extremely well incentivised to cheat as a result of the large amounts of money that go with success in the sport. ‘Imagine if you are not in the main team, but you are in the second team, and the only thing stopping you from being in the main team is you need to be a little quicker, a little sharper. By making the switch from the B team to the main team, there is more money - instead of making £300,000 you are going to make a couple of million. Obviously the temptation is there.’

He says it is not hard for footballers to get their hands on illicit performance enhancing substances and that drug testing within the sport is nowhere near aggressive enough to catch players who are doping. He claims football authorities are not really interested in fighting doping. ‘The big leagues have a lot of money. I don’t know why they don’t set up a good program. They have millions and millions to set up a good program. But they don’t do it. They don’t care. They only test because they are being forced to do it, because there have been scandals. They have to say they are trying to fight doping, but really they are not.’

Hernandez, who goes by the nickname Memo, says it is too easy for footballers to take advantage of lax testing. ‘There is a huge window of opportunity for doping. Footballers take advantage of that by taking substances that leave your body within two or three days. For example, you can take EPO [a red blood cell booster long-beloved of cheating athletes] and it will be out of your system in three days, but the effects of EPO last a lot longer. You know there are a lot of peptides out there that are still not traceable. You can take small doses of testosterone — it would never be traceable.’

He points out it is simple for footballers to get hold of performance-enhancing drugs online or from other sources and that there is no shortage of chemists or medical professionals prepared to advise them. ‘There are a lot of people out there,’ he says. ‘They might not be all that visible, they might not be seen around the athletes all that much… They will work with the footballers to establish a protocol. It is very easy if you know what you are doing. Some athletes are willing to pay whatever it takes to cheat.’

Although he says it is not foolproof, Hernandez believes the adoption by football authorities of the biological passport method of testing, which gives a more detailed picture of an athlete’s long-term blood profile and is used in athletics and cycling, would be a good way to discourage footballers from doping. Without it, he says testing ‘is like playing a blind game.’

He says that after the patent on manufactured EPO expired in 2015, many new forms of the drug were produced, some of which are easier to detect than others. He adds today there are 30 to 40 different forms of EPO. ‘It depends what source materials are used to make it,” he says, pointing out some Chinese-made EPO is particularly hard to detect. “It is not going to trigger a positive with a urine test,’ he says.

Compared to athletes from other sports, the public’s suspicion that footballers are doping in large numbers is low, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. There have been several football-related doping scandals in recent years, including the 2016 undercover filming of Dr Mark Bonar in his London clinic by the Sunday Times and an investigation earlier this year of Dr Julio Cesar Alves in Brazil by German broadcaster ARD.

Dr Bonar was seen claiming to have doped more than 150 athletes, many of whom he said were top-level footballers, and Dr Alves was alleged to have doped members of the Brazil national team. Dr Bonar was recorded saying: ‘Footballers are hardly ever tested anyway. Think about it - if you’re in your late thirties and you’re on the football pitch, how do you keep up with the eighteen year-olds unless you’re doing something?’

Both doctors have since denied doping athletes.

Hernandez says during his doping days he was often approached by footballers or their agents. He says around 2005 he was asked to dope two Manchester-based elite-level footballers. ‘These guys had an agent… I was working with him and he proposed a few soccer players from England…. At the time he had soccer players and all kinds of athletes. He had soccer players in Manchester… He wanted me to set them up, get them ready and stuff.’

Hernandez says he did not work with the Manchester-based players because it was at this time he was subpoenaed by the FBI to appear as a state witness. ‘But if I didn’t work with them, someone else did,’ he says.

Asked about doping in tennis, Hernandez starts laughing. He says the sport is even worse than football in terms of testing for doping. ‘Tennis was paradise for a long time,” he says. “No testing involved. No testing, they were in fucking paradise, enjoying their stuff, loving their stuff. No testing at all. Now I think they have started testing, but I believe it is still a joke.’