The athlete Ouassim Oumaiz, Spanish 5,000m champion, positive in an anti-doping control

With the positive result of the athlete Ouassim Oumaiz, 24 years old and Spanish 5,000m champion, one myth disappears and another is reaffirmed.

No, the peptide hormone GHRP-2 found in the urine of the Malaga athlete is not invisible to anti-doping laboratories, as many athletes believed who had reached such an encouraging conclusion based on the depressing statistics of the last five years published by the World Anti-Doping Agency ( AMA).

Yes, Spanish athletics has a doping problem. The system continues to work. In the 5,000m final of the World Cup in Budapest last August, two Spanish athletes participated. Both are suspended for anti-doping violations. Mo Katir, who won the silver medal, is serving a two-year ban for failing to comply with the location rules, and Oumaiz, 16th in Budapest, is provisionally suspended for a positive result after an out-of-competition test last January, as revealed Brand and confirmed the athlete's coach, Antonio Serrano. “He told me about it on Tuesday afternoon,” says Serrano. “And he told me to be calm, that he had not taken anything, that everything would clear up. But I told him, 'he is in your body.' I trust everyone, but I can't continue with an athlete like that. I already told him, 'pull the blanket and admit it.'

Oumaiz, born in Morocco and raised as a child in Nerja, where his father works as a waiter at the well-known Ayo beach bar, the one in Blue summer, He has been a talent since he was young, European cross country runner-up in 2018, and, according to his coach and agent, Miguel Mostaza, “a special athlete” who has not competed in any specialty, neither cross, nor asphalt, nor track, since last December. . “He likes to be alone, he doesn't usually train with any other athlete in the group,” says Serrano, who trains the best long-distance and middle-distance runners in Spanish athletics. “He connects and disconnects, he is not regular. He had been disconnected since the European cross country, on December 10, in which he suffered a disappointment (24th). And now he was injured in his back.”

Oumaiz is on a scholarship and lives in the Blume Residence, in Madrid, where on January 11 the CELAD controllers knocked on his door, but, like all endurance athletes, he usually spends periods concentrated at altitude, in Sierra Nevada or in Ifrane , in the Moroccan Atlas, a place with a bad reputation in the world of athletics due to the ease with which prohibited products are obtained there. “But he told me that he was going to Ifrane because his parents have a house there,” says Serrano. “And that he wasn't doing anything wrong.” Despite this, other athletes blamed him so much that last summer, after becoming national 5,000m champion in Torrent, Oumaiz reacted by saying that to buy anything you didn't have to go to Morocco. “Right here, in Torrent,” he said, “whoever knows what they want can get it easily.”

According to police sources, GHRP-2 is the leading substance in the doping hit parade today. The myth about its invisibility, its magnificent effects on converting fat into muscle and the ease with which it can be purchased online make it so popular. “In 2021, only two cases of GHRP-2 were detected worldwide, and in 2019, none, and they are the last two reports published,” explains Rosa Ventura, director of the Barcelona anti-doping laboratory.

The AMA points out that between 2015 and 2021, the number of urine analyzes in search of the substance multiplied by three, up to 70,000, which requires a different detection method than the majority of the products on the list. The memory of the athletes, however, and the statistics, is not that of the fans, who remember the GHRP-2 epidemic in 2017. Six cyclists, including the Spanish Samuel Sánchez, tested positive for the hormone and were banned for four years. The Asturian later tested the contamination of a supplement and his sanction was two years.

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