Paris (AFP)

Sweden's Magnus Ericsson, who headed Stockholm's anti-doping laboratory, will head the Châtenay-Malabry anti-doping laboratory on Monday with the Olympics in Paris 2024 in the line of fire.

Aged 48, Magnus Ericsson succeeds Professor Michel Audran, who is retiring at age 71.

This is the first time this laboratory will not be run by a Frenchman.

Appointed June 13 by the college of the French Agency for the fight against doping (AFLD), the Swede will be responsible for driving the French laboratory until the Olympics in Paris-2024, with the Rugby World Cup also organized in France a year earlier.

Until then, he will have to carry out a delicate project, that of the laboratory's move, located in a former gymnasium rehabilitated in Châtenay-Malabry (Hauts-de-Seine), towards more modern premises on the Orsay campus of the University Paris-Sud.

The French laboratory must invest its new premises in the first half of 2023, thanks to state funding. But the Ile-de-France region, which wants to recover its premises of Châtenay-Malabry as of January 1, 2020, requests its departure at the end of the year and proposes that the laboratory goes to settle on another site, on the Génopole of Evry. A solution unlikely for the AFLD, which fears a quick move in less suitable premises than those of Orsay, and which is linked to Paris-South.

Trained at Stockholm University, a specialist in chemistry, Magnus Ericsson enjoys a good reputation in the global anti-doping community. "He helped to recover the Stockholm laboratory, which had lost credit," said an industry player to AFP, on condition of anonymity.

As a French flagship at the origin of the first detection method of EPO in 2000, the Châtenay laboratory had subsequently lost credit compared to some of its European counterparts. But the arrival of Michel Audran, blood doping specialist, early 2017, helped to raise the bar.

In particular, the laboratory has perfected the micro-dose method of EPO, which increases the detection window (from 24 to 48 hours), but these elements still need to be validated by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

The lab still suffered a severe blow in September 2017, when WADA suspended accreditation due to accidental contamination of steroid samples taken from over-doped bodybuilders. This suspension was lifted as early as December 2017.

The laboratory performed nearly 13,000 sample analyzes in 2018.

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