Hamburg player Vuskovic gets two-year ban for EPO-doping

Mario Vuskovic from second division SV Hamburg has been banned for two years over a positive doping test for the forbidden blood booster erythropoietin (EPO), the German Football Federation (DFB) said on Thursday.

The DFB said its sports court made the ruling which came after a long debate over EPO analytics procedures. The maximum sanction would have been a four-year ban. The ban starts retroactively on November 15, 2022, the day the player was suspended.

Vuskovic, 21, can appeal the verdict within one week at the DFB federal court. His lawyer had called for Vuskovic to be cleared because he did not dope.

But a DFB statement said: "The defence had not been able to provide evidence of a false doping finding.

"As a result of the proceedings, the DFB sports court is convinced with sufficient certainty that the analyses of the A and B samples of the player's urine sample in the laboratory in Kreischa revealed the presence of erythropetin, or EPO, which is foreign to the body."

Vuskovic tested positive in a sample taken on September 16 and the analysis of the b-sample in December confirmed the original finding.

Four experts engaged by SV Hamburg had deemed the test result false-positive. The head of the Kreischa lab, which is accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), had said Vuskovic's sample was exactly "like a positive sample" would look like.

That was good news for WADA which has been using a method to check by eye whether a sample is positive or not for more than 20 years and which has been questioned repeatedly. Almost all other doping substances are detected by the mass spectrometricy analytical tool method.