"Serious sports fraud": Two years in prison for former professional cyclist

"Serious Sports Fraud"
Two years in prison for ex-professional cyclist

In cycling, performances are required that are no longer possible without doping, says the former professional Stefan Denifl. In court he is sentenced to two years in prison for "serious sports fraud". Denifl says he is not a criminal, the teams in the Radspurt know about blood doping.

For "serious sports fraud", the former professional cyclist Stefan Denifl from Austria has been sentenced to two years in prison by the Innsbruck regional court. 16 months of which are suspended. There is now a three-day period for prosecution and defense to appeal the judgment.

The 33-year-old Tyrolean Denifl was blown up in the course of "Operation Aderlass" and later admitted blood doping. The prosecution had also accused him of stashing money before the trial and had therefore extended the charges to fraud. Denifl was acquitted of this charge.

Denifl is one of 23 athletes from eight European countries who are said to have been involved in blood doping as a customer of Erfurt sports doctor Mark S. The doctor from Thuringia attracted attention through investigations into Operation Aderlass, which had been initiated in February 2019 on the sidelines of the Nordic World Ski Championships in Seefeld. The sentence for Mark S. will be announced in Munich next Friday. The prosecutor has asked for five and a half years in prison.

According to the indictment, Denifl is said to have carried out blood doping between 2014 and 2018. But he assured me that he was not a criminal. In the professional field, performances are required that are no longer possible without doping. The teams knew about it, without doping he would never have received a contract after a knee injury, said the winner of the Tour of Austria in 2017.

Mark S. recently had his penultimate day of the trial. The prosecutor sees the Thuringian as a doping organizer who wanted to earn money with the fraud for years, took the professional oath "completely in the bin" and is sentenced to five and a half years imprisonment for dangerous bodily harm. The doctor's lawyers, on the other hand, want to have their client free soon, preferably immediately after the verdict is announced on Friday. The defense lawyers demanded that the arrest warrant be suspended. Only the prosecution and defense agreed that Mark S. had been doing blood doping on several winter and cycling athletes for years and, in the last years of his actions, up to the raid of "Operation Aderlass" in February 2019, involved four helpers.

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