A fresh high-profile case in pro cycling shines a light on a complex, crucial, and little-understood tool in the fight for clean sport.
Cor Vos
For all of its importance in the fight against doping, the biological passport often does its work in the background. Pro bike racers certainly spend plenty of time in testing, but the results of those tests rarely make waves.
Current events, however, have put the anti-doping tool into the spotlight. Last month, Oier Lazkano (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) became the latest WorldTour pro provisionally suspended due to abnormal passport findings from his time on Movistar. Given that his suspension was purely down to unusual values in his personal profile, Lazkano can still claim to have never “tested positive,” even if he ultimately loses his case. Unfortunately for Lazkano, that doesn’t necessarily matter.
Suspended Lazkano asserts ‘I am a clean athlete and a person of integrity’
Oier Lazkano has spoken up following his provisional suspension due to anomalies in his ABP, and the termination of his contract with Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe.
Under precedent set over a decade ago, sufficiently abnormal values in an athlete’s biological passport can be evidence enough to lead to sanctions. Compared to adverse analytical findings for banned substances, passport-based sanctions are relatively rare at pro cycling’s highest level; before Lazkano, the last WorldTour rider suspended for passport anomalies was Franck Bonnamour in 2024.
Authorities have used the tool sparingly, for a variety of reasons. For starters, only extreme abnormalities even trigger investigation, let alone the determination of likely doping. Moreover, not all cases have led to successful convictions, with Roman Kreuziger in 2014 being a particularly high-profile example of a passport case being overturned. But amid Lazkano’s high-profile provisional suspension for suspicious biomarkers over a three-year period when he was at Movistar, and a second case involving a Continental-level rider, now seems as good a time as any for an explainer on the biological passport.
The tool is a pillar of modern anti-doping efforts, but fans could be forgiven for coming away from the past few weeks of news with questions about the basics. What does the biological passport actually test? How can suspicious findings in an athlete’s passport lead to disciplinary action? And just what, exactly, counts as suspicious?
If you’re looking for the answers to questions like that and more, read on. Here is how it all works …
What is the biological passport exactly?
The Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) is a long-term biological monitoring system for Olympic sports including cycling, a tool designed not to catch dopers red-handed, but to reveal the physiological traces that doping leaves behind. In pro cycling and many other IOC-recognized sports, it is managed by the International Testing Agency (ITA) in collaboration with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which assumed responsibility for the system after the UCI introduced the original version in pro cycling in 2008.
Rather than testing directly for banned substances, the ABP monitors an athlete’s biochemistry, measuring levels of a range of haematological and hormonal markers over time. By tracking these specific biological markers and building an individual profile for each rider, anti-doping authorities can detect indirect evidence of doping, such as blood manipulation or hormone abuse, even when the substance or method itself is no longer directly detectable.
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