If you play with fire, you may get burned.

ABSTRACT

This article reports an interesting doping case in the late 1990s involving the physical tampering of a urine sample containing a prohibited substance, by adding an alcoholic beverage. The regulations and knowledge available at that time allowed consideration of the case as a sanctioned manipulation and the prohibited substance as an additional element that explained the reasons for it. The development of the case involved some aspects that appeared for the first time in doping control. These include, among others, the participation of an enologist as part of the B sample confirmation, forensic inspection of the sample container, the early development of gas chromatography/combustion/isotopic ratio mass spectrometry (GC/C/IRMS), and the first public hearing by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which allowed a wide following of the developments of the case. The information was especially interesting for the general public as the athlete had had, at that time, great Olympic success.