Siutsou given four-year doping ban nearly two years after retirement
Nearly two years after he tested positive for EPO and subsequently retired, Kanstantsin Siutsou has been handed a four-year ban by the UCI, backdated to run from 2018 to September of 2022.
Siutsou, 37, registered the adverse analytical finding for EPO in an out-of-competition test on July 31, 2018. At the time, he was in his second year with the Bahrain-Merida organization. Prior to joining the team, he rode for multiple years with Columbia-HTC and then Sky, and for one season with Dimension Data.
Siutsou played support roles in the Grand Tour victories for both Chris Froome and Vincenzo Nibali during his stints with Sky and Bahrain, respectively.
He also collected some results of his own over the course of his career, including a Giro d’Italia stage win, two Giro GC top 10s, and multiple Belarusian national time trial titles.
In 2018, Siutsou was slated to race the Giro with Bahrain on the heels of his overall win at the Tour of Croatia, but he broke a vertebra in a crash while reconning the Giro’s opening time trial in Israel. He returned to racing in June of that year, before a test in July registered the presence of EPO.
When Siutsou was notified in September of his adverse analytical finding, Bahrain released a statement announcing that he had been informed in June that his contract would not be renewed. Siutsou announced his retirement, and has not raced since. Now, he is ineligible to do so until September 4, 2022.
The post Siutsou given four-year doping ban nearly two years after retirement appeared first on CyclingTips.