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.’