Vienna (AFP)
Former Austrian background and biathlon trainer Walter Mayer was given a suspended suspended sentence of 15 months in prison on Friday for providing doping products in the Aderlass case, which dismantled an international doping network in 2019, said Regional Court of Innsbruck.
Walter Mayer, 63, had pleaded partially guilty and waived his right of appeal, but the prosecutor has not made a statement and the verdict is not final.
The former coach of the national team was found guilty of having played a central role in building up a large clientele of athletes to whom he supplied for several years doping products, in particular EPO and hormones of growth.
He was implicated in the wake of a spectacular police phone call during the Nordic World Ski Championships in the Austrian resort of Seefeld in February 2019. This operation had led to the dismantling of an important doping network organized around of the German doctor Mark Schmidt, also arrested.
This network is said to have supplied doping products for cross-country skiers and cyclists, in particular, more than twenty athletes from different European countries, according to the German investigators in charge of the investigations.
It was the former Austrian founder Johannes Dürr who had revealed the existence of the traffic of which he is accused by the courts of having been an active collaborator.
Former coach Walter Mayer had previously been involved in doping scandals that affected Austria at the 2002 Salt Lake City and Turin 2006 Olympic Games
© 2020 AFP