Fresh off of winning a 2023 amateur UCI Gran Fondo World Championship in Scotland last month, former WorldTour Pro and banned doper Alexandre “Vino” Vinokourov added another amateur world title to his palmarès at the IRONMAN World Championship last weekend in Nice, France.

The 50 year-old former Olympic and Vuelta a Espana champion not only won an IRONMAN world triathlon title in his age category, he destroyed the hopes and dreams of 343 middle-age amateur athletes with a dominant performance. Vino defeated runner-up Sean Brunt of New Zealand by over 25 minutes! It was the second largest winning margin at the event, only eclipsed by former pro cyclist Laurent Jalabert who won the 55-59 age category by a ludicrous 38 minutes.

Vino’s performance was so strong he finished 55th overall out of 2269 competitors, ranging from 19 to 80 years-old, including 70 world class pro triathletes. He was 44th in the 112-mile cycling time trial with time of 4:58:11 and 55th on the 26.2 mile run in 3:16:12. Swimming is clearly not his forte, he came out of the 2.4 mile ocean swim in 1052nd place.

With Vinokourov’s (and Jalabert’s) dominant performance and past doping history it did not take long for heated discussions to start on triathlon website Slowtwitch.com.

The_Exile posted, “I don’t understand why an ex world tour pro would want to move to amateur triathlon racing against a bunch of middle aged men most of whom would have been working in an office 40+ hours a week whilst they were training day in day out. Sad.” 

Vols added, “I won’t knock a guy (or woman) who loves competing for competing in events that are available to them – nothing wrong with that at all, it’s great. That said, both of these dudes have known or highly suspected doping pasts – I have a problem with that.” 

Laki reminded everyone that this happened in 2019 too, “Both gentlemen performed quite well at the 2019 70.3 WC at Nice and both of them received quite loud booing when picking [up] their awards. Audience was quite aware of their reputation.”

Robert Preston was more forgiving and less judgmental, “I have no problem with them racing. And winning.”

IRONMAN has not disclosed if it requires anti-doping tests for top amateur athletes at their events. Though, it seems highly unlikely since the IRONMAN Anti-Doping Program lists only 31 athletes (pro and amateur) banned for doping violations over the last 12 years.

To put that in perspective, NADO Italia, long considered the world’s best anti-doping organization, has charged over 30 amateur cyclists with doping violations in Italy so far this year.

Photo Credit: Astana Qazaqstan Team

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