Saved by a doping test

When his team doctor called about an abnormal test result, Torstein Træen could not believe what was happening but it would turn out to be a potentially life-saving red flag

- Chris Marshall-Bell

It was May 2022 and Torstein Træen was in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain tucking into a big breakfast with his Uno-X Pro Cycling team-mates. The date has stuck in his mind. “It was Friday the 13th – we were joking with each other that something bad was going to happen today,” remembers the 27-year-old Norwegian, speaking to me by phone from a winter training camp in Altea, Spain. Træen recalls the exact moment when, while walking back to his room to get ready for the day’s ride, his phone rang. It was Knut Rønning, the team’s doctor. “He asked me if I had read the email in my inbox, and I was like, ‘yeah, yeah’.” But Træen had skimmed over it, missing the email’s significance. Rønning spelled it out: “You’ve returned a positive for hCG from the Volta a Catalunya.”

The letters ‘hCG’ stand for human chorionic gonadotropin, a sex hormone that in females triggers critical processes during pregnancy but which in males is usually found only in very low levels. It is on WADA’s banned doping list for male athletes because hCG products stimulate testosterone production.