Oier Lazkano was one of Red Bull’s big signings for 2025. His spring classics campaign flopped but then so did the rest of the team. Then he vanished. He stopped racing, deleted social media accounts and the team were silent on what was happening.
Now we know better as he’s been provisionally suspended over his bio passport. It’s a point that gets stressed again below that he’s still innocent so here’s a look at the procedural elements of this case.
Oier Lazkano Lopez has been provisionally suspended in accordance with the UCI Anti-Doping Rules, due to unexplained abnormalities in his Athlete Biological Passport (*) in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
UCI press release, 30 October
First a reminder on how the system works. If you’ve read a version of this before then scroll down beyond the photo below.
The athlete biological passport was a scheme launched in 2008 and monitors both blood and steroid levels. These values are logged into a database and over time a “longitudinal profile” of each athlete is established. This passport is run by the International Testing Agency (ITA), an independent agency in Lausanne, Switzerland that the UCI contracts to run its anti-doping programme.
Unlike the binary toxicology testing, where a lab looks for banned substances and either it’s positive or negative, the passport looks at changes in levels. Software uses logic and probability algorithms to spot anomalies. Here’s a screenshot of the passport software – from a laboratory presentation that’s no longer online – showing haemoglobin, the off-score, the Abnormal Blood Profile Score and the reticulocyte ratio
The software alerts if an athlete’s numbers deviate from an established pattern. When this happens an expert reviews the data from the system and has four options:
- do nothing because the data look normal to the human eye/brain
- recommend the athlete is placed on a list for target testing
- alert the athlete that they could be suffering from a serious illness
- state improbable natural causes, ie a likely doping case
In the event of the fourth option, the data is given to two more experts to look at independently. All three must review the same data set and only if each concludes that, in the words of WADA’s procedural manuals, “it is highly likely that a prohibited substance or prohibited method had been used and unlikely that it is the result of any other cause” will the case proceed.
If the three concur then a file is created with the athlete’s age, gender, sport and a range of other information such as the chain of custody for the samples taken, whether the athlete was at altitude and so on. This is reviewed and the three experts must agree for an “adverse passport finding” and if so then an anti-doping organisation is notified, here for pro cycling it is the UCI.
The UCI contacts the rider to advise them that it is mulling an anti-doping case and includes the dossier with the data as well as other information like the sample timing and chain of custody, and invites them to give an explanation. There is still a case for a rider to explain they were at altitude camp or point to some illness that might have affected their blood values.
This can take many months, if a rider has a questionable blood value from one test on one day there’s a lot for them to go back and recall, perhaps to ask a former employer to share medical records, then to gather this, appoint medical experts to review it for them, perhaps translate documents and more.
Only when there’s no satisfactory answer – or no reply at all – will the UCI go public and make the provisional suspension which is where we got to yesterday.
For the Lazkano case we can probably infer that he was contacted in the spring by the UCI and given the ITU’s passport dossier and stopped racing. In a way he provisionally suspended himself. The long wait until yesterday’s news is because the UCI is keen to give time to these procedures, so that if Lazkano is informed he has time to find experts, to meet with them, to present his arguments and more. At no point can the UCI try to rush this otherwise an athlete can say their defence was rushed and try to appeal the whole process in the civil courts. It’s also fair to give him a chance a resolve this in private.
We know from a Movistar team press release today (email, no URL to team website) that quoted a UCI email that Lazkano replied with an “explanation and supporting documentation” which suggests further work on both sides.
The UCI refers to “abnormalities in 2022, 2023 and 2024” and you might be wondering why 2022 gets raised now rather than then. But it’s not like a positive test, instead the passport can pick up a change in the baseline or only detect manipulation after it has stopped or something has changed.
If this works as an analogy, imagine you secretly got a e-bike and on group rides you often drop everyone and when uploading the ride to Strava people note your heart rate is never as high as your peers, even when you beat them to the top of climbs. Friends quiz you and you just say you’ve got a naturally low heart rate. But one day you go back to a normal bike and suddenly all your rides seem to have higher heart rates compared to the same efforts before. It’s this sort of shift in the baseline that can be detected later rather than at the time.
Maybe it’s a bad example as someone could pick up your bike or hear a noise, whatever but the idea is it’s not the wild numbers in the moment but a change in the trend or the baseline, for the passport it’s often the OFF-score to use the haematology jargon. Also if the numbers do look curious they might invite more testing including during the off-season and this fills out the trend more.
In fact to be more specific it could that the passport detects a shift which raises an alarm and then this leads to more testing. Far from alerting the rider in question, they are tested more so as to collect more data to measure the score such that the unusual numbers from the past continue to stick out. This has happened before.
The Movistar press release says the team did not know anything about this until yesterday. It also says Lazkano was tested many times during his years with the time and always got a resultado negativo but by now hopefully you’ve got the point of the passport: it doesn’t necessarily catch athletes in the moment but through the accumulation of data points.
The next steps could be slow and so far Lazkano has not said anything, he’s not been seen in public since the spring. It’s worth stressing that right now he’s innocent, there’s a hearing and due process to go through. But we can add the UCI has yet to lose a passport case in hearings or appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and won’t proceed unless it’s confident, it is not in the habit of suspending riders to explore borderline cases.
It could take a long time. The last case was Franck Bonnamour, the data questioned by the UCI came from 2022 and it was in February 2024 that he was provisionally suspended and then in August 2025 we got the verdict and the four year ban was announced. Bonnamour insisted he was innocent throughout.
This case matters as it involves a World Tour rider, the last time this happened was in 2022 with Miguel Angel Lopez at the Giro although that was not a passport case. Perhaps it’s just symbolic at for level but that’s half the point too, a potential case at this level will get more headlines.
Once again Lazkano is still innocent but the provisional suspension has been enough for Red Bull to eject him according to Cycling Weekly, something subsequently confirmed by press release. This leaves an obvious hole in the classics team.
If convicted there’s a good chance results could be overturned, for example Juan Ayuso stands to gain the Spanish road race title for 2023; Arnaud Démare might get win number 98 from the GC at the Boucles de la Mayenne.
Conclusion
It’s a slow process but hopefully this blog post explains why it takes so much time, whether the lag detecting anomalies or the slow pace where the UCI avoids rushing things so it’s not exposed to an appeal over procedure.
Lazkano is still innocent for now but he’s been dropped by his team and the UCI has never lost one of these cases. But it’s also going to take time to get to a verdict, and longer still for the reasoned decision setting out the detail.
Looking wider, the passport is an established tool and has now caught many riders… but just them. No coaching staff, medics or others get caught despite the complexities of manipulating blood values.
IR points out that the UCI will only take action in clear cut cases. That means all in the grey area – including very dark grey – will avoid censure. That must surely include some guilty riders. One must also assume that well-organised teams and riders pushing the boundaries escape sanction too. That’s frustrating but, as IR suggests, the UCI can do little more.
Question: are discreet warnings ever given without formal action?
Grey areas will attract more scrutiny, hopefully leading to prosecution or exoneration.
Could this have an effect on the worldtour selection? I quickly found plenty of new points for Cofidis.
Has any rider other than Sergio Henao been publicly named (I assume by the UCI?) for having biological passport irregularities, and then got off with it? I don’t remember any.
And was the reason Henao was found to be not guilty ever made public, with the science backing this?
You say, ‘the UCI has yet to lose a passport case in hearings or appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport’, I’m wondering how many cases they don’t go forward with so that they don’t lose.
Excellent explanation, thanks.
Nice explanation thanks, the e bike example was good I thought. I guess the concern is this is based on probabilities, ie there is an observation so improbable that it could not be through chance. But there are probabilities and probabilities. In my research I always like to see highly significant findings, that is where the probability of seeing results through chance are less than one in a thousand say. The more borderline this is, the less certain you can be. I’m sure there are very clever people analysing these data but I still just have this concern in the back of my head. But overall having said this the longitudinal nature of the data and the ability to see trends is a good improvement.