EXCLUSIVE: Memo Hernandez on how athletes cheat and get away with it

Legendary former doping kingpin spills the beans on what it takes to make it at the top

May 2017

It's not easy to get hold of Ángel Hernández, the legendary Mexican chemist who for a decade provided illicit performance-enhancing drugs to numerous athletes, including, he claims, all eight 100 metres finalists at the Beijing Olympics. It took me just over a year of trying. The FBI also struggled.

The story goes that when they eventually caught up with him in 2005 he had been holed up in a hotel room in Texas, living under an assumed name for two years. Presented with numerous incriminating wire-tapped telephone conversations and bank statements as part of the investigation that eventually sent three-time Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones to prison, Hernández became a state witness in return for avoiding chokey.

Today, he says, he is clean, no longer juicing athletes but instead working in top-level boxing (‘It’s terribly dirty’), putting his deep knowledge of sports science to use as a conditioning expert. ‘I’ve been clean since I became a Federal witness and that is the only way for me until the day I die.’

Perhaps more than anyone else alive, Hernández — who was previously known as Ángel ‘Memo’ Heredia — understands the charade that top-level sport internationally has become and the inability of drug-testing programmes to prevent athletes from cheating in order to win enormous sums of money. He knows what athletes — ‘like the soccer players in London’ — are prepared to invest in order to ensure they are quicker and fitter than the other guy.

Are footballers really doping? ‘Yes, of course.’ He says drug testing in the game is nowhere near frequent or aggressive enough to prevent it. ‘Think about it; if you are a soccer player you can do a blood transfusion [to boost oxygen levels in the blood]. If there is no testing, like a biological passport, then you can get away with a blood transfusion. Get away with it easily. You can still get away with all the other tricks in the house, too. You can still get away with micro–dosing EPO [a red blood cell booster], micro–dosing IGF-1 [a muscle growth hormone].

‘The problem is that the testing has got better, but it has not got to the point where they can detect everything, as they say they can.’ He adds that drug-testing bodies are reluctant to admit publicly the limitations of their testing procedures for fear of losing funding. ‘They have to justify to the public how much money they make, saying they are working on detection methods, when in reality the detection methods they have are not 100 per cent reliable.’

Hernández says a major problem for testers is the ever-increasing number of drugs coming on to the market. ‘You have got to understand that as the pharmaceutical industry grows year by year, new drugs [with performance-enhancing qualities] come to the public or into the research environment. What happens is the testers don’t catch up until later on. There is always a gap. Some of the athletes are cheating now; they are taking advantage of an opportunity that lasts a year, maybe a year and a half, before the testing authorities have any idea what is happening. They are abusing those drugs.’