The straight dope

It’s not easy to get hold of Ángel Hernández, the legendary Mexican chemist who for a decade provided illicit performance-enhancing drugs to numerous athletes, including, he claims, all eight 100 metres finalists at the Beijing Olympics. It took me just over a year of trying. The FBI also struggled. The story goes that when they eventually caught up with him in 2005 he had been holed up in a hotel room in Texas, living under an assumed name for two years. Presented with numerous incriminating wire-tapped telephone conversations and bank statements as part of the investigation that eventually sent three-time Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones to prison, Hernández became a state witness in return for avoiding chokey.

Today, he says, he is clean, no longer juicing athletes but instead working in top-level boxing (‘It’s terribly dirty’), putting his deep knowledge of sports science to use as a conditioning expert. ‘I’ve been clean since I became a Federal witness and that is the only way for me until the day I die.