Zitate aus der Sunday Times zur Recherche über Dr. Mark Bonar, 3.4.2016
"... The drugs had all been prescribed by Bonar in a series of consultations three years ago. At the time, Bonar, ... was working as an anti-ageing specialist in Harley Street, central London, offering testosterone replacement therapy to menopausal men.
In his first consultation, the whistleblower says he told the doctor he was struggling with low energy in training and had read that testosterone might help — even though it was banned. After a blood test, the whistleblower says Bonar told him he had low testosterone and gave him a double shot of the drug on his second visit.
The whistleblower claims Bonar then “corrupted” him by offering him EPO and human growth hormone. “I knew taking these drugs was wrong but I was curious. I wanted to know how much these drugs could improve performance,” said the whistleblower.
However, Ukad’s testers knocked on his door in early 2014 and he was given a two-year ban. In the hope of reducing the length of his suspension, he offered the anti-doping body’s intelligence unit evidence about Bonar’s doping service and doping by other athletes.
... The whistleblower told the investigators that Bonar had given him performance-enhancing drugs and said the doctor had talked openly about giving similar treatment to a “world-class boxer”.
He went on to describe how he had also visited another London clinic where one of British sport’s top doctors had advised him on drugs he might take which mimicked the effects of testosterone but were not yet banned in sport.
One of British sport’s top doctors advised the use of drugs which mimicked the effects of testosterone but were not yet banned in sport.
Five months elapsed and the whistleblower became increasingly frustrated that the investigators did not appear to be acting on his allegations. By then he had hired a legal team at a personal cost of £60,000 to force the anti-doping body to take his evidence seriously.
...
His solicitor received an email response from Ukad’s lawyer, Stacey Shevill ... She wrote: “If [the whistleblower] wished to provide evidence against the doctor, he would need to do this by way of a written statement setting out everything he knows and attaching all documentary evidence (including, for example, prescriptions).”
So the whistleblower drafted his own witness statement and handed over his prescriptions from Bonar. But it still was not enough. In January 2015, he received an email from Graham Arthur, Ukad’s legal director, saying his information had been investigated and this had “not led to the discovery of [an] anti-doping rule violation or other grounds for action to be taken against Dr Bonar.”
Earlier Ukad had informed the whistleblower that it would pass the evidence on to the GMC if it had no jurisdiction over the doctor. In the end, it did not.
...
There was a simple way to check out the whistleblower’s story: send in another athlete to the doctor’s clinic undercover. The German broadcaster ARD/WDR — which has been collaborating with this newspaper on doping stories — put our reporters in touch with a young aspiring Olympic runner who was willing help.
... [Bonar] charges £150 for a 20-minute consultation but also claims he takes a cut of any profits on the drugs he prescribes or any diagnostic treatment he recommends.
And his drug programme is expensive. A course of growth hormone, for example, can cost as much as £1,600 a month and he also charges £600 a time for the regular blood tests needed to monitor the effect of the drugs. ...
The runner was, of course, super-fit and healthy as his blood tests were to show when he returned for his second appointment two weeks later. But Bonar had spotted something.
“Your haematocrit [red blood cell count] is, if I’m being honest, a little lowish side. That can obviously affect performance — things like endurance. The way that you would boost that, potentially, is to use something like EPO, which you may have heard of.”
... The runner’s blood levels were in fact within the normal range and there was no clinical reason to prescribe EPO. His hormone levels were fine, too, but Bonar wanted to give him an injection of testosterone at his surgery that day.
As the runner was working undercover and had no desire to cheat, he told Bonar he wanted to postpone the treatment until a later date. However, he left the surgery with prescriptions for two banned performance enhancing drugs: Genotropin (human growth hormone) and DHEA (a steroid hormone).
... In order to find out more about Bonar’s activities, the runner introduced the doctor to an undercover reporter posing as the “uncle” who financed his treatment.
At a third appointment in the Knightsbridge clinic, the reporter sought to clarify whether the drugs had been prescribed for any other reason than performance. Bonar was only too willing to confirm: “He doesn’t have any medical problems.”
Nonetheless, he offered to put the runner on an eight-week programme of steroid injections and went on to explain that some of his other sports clients tended to do this three times a year “off season”. It was an opportunity to ask him about who his other clients were.
He began reeling off a list of sports. It was the first time he had helped a runner but he worked with “pretty much every other sport” and they were all “elite”.
...
So who were the sportsmen and women Bonar was dealing with? As a device to talk to Bonar more openly outside his clinic, the reporter explained that his business partner was working with half a dozen young athletes hoping to compete at the Rio Olympics who would also benefit from his doping programme.
Bonar was only too happy to be of service. “[The athletes] just need a bit of tweaking, yeah,” he said.
It was agreed that the fee for doping so many athletes would be £15,000 a month. This led to the dinner with the two undercover reporters in early January at the five-star Lanesborough Hotel.
Bonar was in confessional mood that evening. He had barely sipped his first glass of red wine before he started naming some of his famous sports star clients from football, cricket, boxing and mixed martial arts. This newspaper has decided not to name the sportsmen Bonar identified but the information will be passed to the authorities.
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Bonar was also tied up with another serious matter, unrelated to sport, which questioned his ethics. In December, he appeared before the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service accused of giving inappropriate treatment to a terminally ill cancer patient. He denies any wrongdoing and the tribunal is expected to make a decision later this month.
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