On 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. Eighteen months after that, the Court of Arbitration for Sport took the title off him.
Everyone remembers the steak. Fewer people remember what the court actually decided, and that's what this episode is about. I've looked at the case the way a lawyer would — the evidence, who had to prove what, and how the panel got to its answer — because the real story is more interesting, and more uncomfortable, than "he blamed his dinner."
The finding
The Cologne laboratory found clenbuterol at 50 picograms per millilitre. That's a tiny amount. The UCI said at the time it was far below the level WADA labs were even required to be able to detect. But clenbuterol had no threshold. Any amount was a positive.
The steak
Contador's explanation was beef. José Luis López Cerrón, organiser of the Vuelta a Castilla y León, had bought fillet at a butcher in Irun, over the border in the Basque Country, and brought it to the team in Pau. Contador ate it on 20 and 21 July. Clenbuterol is sometimes used illegally by farmers to bulk up cattle, so the idea wasn't absurd.
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.
The burden of proof
Here's the bit most people skip, and it's the whole case. Anti-doping works on strict liability. The authorities don't have to prove you meant to cheat. If the substance is in your sample, you're responsible for it. To get out of a ban, you have to prove how it got there — on the balance of probability — and that you weren't at fault.
So the question in front of the panel was never "did Contador dope?" It was "has Contador shown that the meat 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, wasn't 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. And the steak was long gone, so it couldn't be tested.
But — and this is the part that still makes people argue — the panel didn't accept the other side's story either. The UCI and WADA had argued a blood transfusion, pointing to plasticiser residues in one sample and his blood values. CAS rated that as unlikely as the meat. Its conclusion was that the most likely source was a contaminated food supplement. Contador's side had never argued it; the UCI had raised it only as a fallback. And a contaminated supplement doesn't get you off, because you're responsible for what you take.
Two-year ban, backdated with credit for time served. The 2010 Tour went to Schleck. The 2011 Giro went to Michele Scarponi. He came back in August 2012 and won the Vuelta.
Why it still divides people
Strip the headlines away and you're left with a court that said, in effect: we can't find the doping story proven, we can't find the innocent story proven, so the rule decides it. Under strict liability that's the system working as designed. To a lot of fans it felt like a man being punished for a mystery.
And the rules have moved since. From June 2021, WADA requires low-level clenbuterol findings — at or below 5 nanograms per millilitre, a hundred times Contador's reading — to be treated as atypical and investigated for meat contamination before anyone is charged. That doesn't mean he'd walk free today; the investigation still has to support the meat. But it does mean the case would start from a different place.
I've written up the full case — the timeline, the legal reasoning and what it means for any amateur who races under anti-doping rules and takes supplements — in Contador's contaminated steak: the clenbuterol case explained. If you want the wider history of how cycling decides who keeps a title and who loses it, read Armstrong and Ullrich: why one was stripped.
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