Everyone remembers the steak. It's become one of cycling's great punchlines, right up there with Tyler Hamilton's vanishing twin. But if you go back and read what the Court of Arbitration for Sport actually decided in February 2012, it's a stranger and more uncomfortable story than the joke suggests.
The court didn't find that Contador had doped. It didn't find that he hadn't. It found that neither story was proven — and then it let the rule decide.
I went through the case on the podcast in the truth behind Contador's contaminated steak. This is the written version: the timeline, the legal reasoning, and what it means for you if you race on a licence and take supplements.
The sample
On the evening of 21 July 2010, the second rest day of the Tour de France, Alberto Contador gave a urine sample in Pau. Four days later he won the Tour by 39 seconds from Andy Schleck.
The WADA-accredited laboratory in Cologne found clenbuterol in it at 50 picograms per millilitre. Clenbuterol is a drug that can help build muscle and shed fat, and it's banned at any level. There was no threshold for it. The UCI said the amount was far below the concentration WADA laboratories were then required to be able to detect. Small, but still a positive.
The UCI notified him in late August and provisionally suspended him. The case went public on 30 September.
The steak
Contador's explanation was beef. José Luis López Cerrón, the organiser of the Vuelta a Castilla y León, had bought fillet at a butcher in Irun, just over the border in the Basque Country, and brought it to the team in Pau. Contador said he ate it on 20 and 21 July.
As an explanation it wasn't ridiculous. Clenbuterol has been used illegally by some farmers to bulk up cattle, and meat contamination is a known problem in some countries. WADA itself later dropped cases against Mexican footballers who'd tested positive after eating meat there.
The Spanish federation's examining judge proposed a one-year ban. Then, in February 2011, the federation's committee cleared him completely. The UCI and WADA appealed to CAS, and the case was heard in Lausanne in November 2011.
The burden of proof
This is the part that matters, and it's the part most people skip.
Anti-doping runs on strict liability. The authorities do not have to prove you intended to cheat. If a prohibited substance is in your sample, the violation is established. To escape or reduce a ban, it's on you to show how the substance got there — on the balance of probability, which means more likely than not — and that you weren't at fault.
So the question in front of the panel was never really "did Contador dope?" It was "has Contador shown that the steak is more likely than not to be the source?"
What CAS decided
On that question, he lost.
The panel noted that Spain, unlike some countries outside Europe, was not known to have a clenbuterol problem in beef. WADA's figures showed no positives across thousands of cattle samples from the regions involved. No other athlete had ever blamed Spanish meat. Tests on meat from the Irun butcher found nothing, and the steak itself was long gone.
But the panel didn't accept the case against him either. The UCI and WADA had argued that the clenbuterol came from a blood transfusion — pointing to plasticiser residues in one of his samples and his blood values. CAS judged that as unlikely as the meat.
Where it landed was a third option: that the most likely source was a contaminated food supplement. Contador's side had never argued it, because it doesn't help an athlete. You're responsible for what you take, so a dirty supplement is still your violation. CAS found no grounds to reduce the sanction.
Two-year ban, with credit for the time he'd already served. His 2010 Tour result was disqualified, along with results from 25 January 2011 — including the 2011 Giro d'Italia, which went to Michele Scarponi. He was eligible to race again from 6 August 2012, and won the Vuelta a España a few weeks later.
Why it still divides people
Strip the headlines away and you're left with a court saying, in effect: we can't find the innocent story proven, we can't find the doping story proven, so the rule decides.
Under strict liability that is the system working exactly as it's designed to. Without it, every positive becomes an argument about what an athlete intended, and very few cases would ever end in a sanction. But to a lot of fans, it felt like a man losing a Tour de France to a mystery — especially at a concentration below the level labs of the time were even required to detect.
Both of those things can be true at once. That's why, more than 15 years on, this one still gets argued about at café stops.
When the meat defence does work
It's worth knowing that the meat explanation isn't always a loser. It depends on the evidence behind it.
In October 2011, WADA dropped its appeals against five Mexican footballers who'd tested positive for clenbuterol at the Gold Cup, citing compelling evidence of a meat-contamination problem in Mexico. In 2014 the UCI accepted that Michael Rogers' clenbuterol positive at the Japan Cup, days after racing the Tour of Beijing, had a significant probability of coming from contaminated meat in China. His Japan Cup result was voided, but he faced no further sanction.
The difference from Contador isn't the story. It's the evidence around it. In Mexico and China there was a documented contamination problem. In Spain there wasn't, and the panel said so.
The rules have moved since
In June 2021 WADA changed how low-level clenbuterol findings are handled. Findings at or below 5 nanograms per millilitre — a hundred times Contador's reading — are now reported as atypical and investigated for possible meat contamination before any charge is brought. If the investigation supports meat as the source, the athlete can keep their results.
That doesn't mean Contador would walk away today. The investigation would still need to support a meat source, and in his case the evidence pointed away from Spanish beef. But the case would start from a very different place.
What this means for amateurs
Here's the bit that affects you. If you race on a licence from a national federation, you can be tested, and you're under exactly the same principle as a Tour winner: you're responsible for what's in your body. Masters racing has had positives. It isn't only a pro problem.
Four practical habits:
Take fewer supplements. Most amateurs take far more than they need. Every product you add is another chance of contamination. If you can get it from food, get it from food.
Choose batch-tested products. Third-party programmes that test supplement batches for prohibited substances reduce the risk of contamination. They don't remove it, and they don't move your responsibility onto the manufacturer.
Keep records. Keep the packaging and batch numbers of what you take in the weeks around a race. If something ever goes wrong, that's your evidence.
Check medications. Use your national anti-doping agency's lookup tool for anything from a cold remedy to a prescription, and speak to your doctor about a therapeutic use exemption where one is needed.
None of that is about suspecting yourself. It's about knowing the rules you're riding under.
If you want the bigger picture of how cycling decides who keeps a title and who loses it, read Armstrong and Ullrich: why one was stripped and our piece on doping in amateur and masters racing.
And if you've got a view on the verdict, come and argue it with us in the free Roadman community on Skool: https://www.skool.com/roadmancycling