September 24, 2007 (Montreal, QC) — We contacted Louis Barbeau, Director General of the Fédération Québécoise des Sports Cyclistes (FQSC), the association that governs cycling in Quebec, for his comments regarding Geneviéve Jeanson’s recent admission during a Radio Canada interview (Part 1) that she doped with EPO, “almost all of her (cycling) career.” Jeanson, 26, is from Lachine, Quebec, and was formerly “the golden girl” of cycling in Canada before retiring in December, 2006 (click here for more info.).

Finally, we need to promote examples of our athletes who are successful and are drug-free. This illustrates that it is possible to reach the top without having to use drugs and therefore cheating and risking one’s health.

We asked Barbeau a follow up question as to why Jeanson held a U.S. racing licence instead of a Quebec/Canadian licence and here’s what he told us.

LB: Not much to say about her U.S. license. The fact is that she lived in the U.S. at the time and it was normal for her to get her license there. On our side, we felt very uncomfortable to issue a license given the incident in Hamilton 2003 for which we had no explanation, since she claimed she had not used EPO. And given the fact that she did not want to cooperate with the scientific commission that had been put together (she did not provide any of her hematocrit levels over the years), we decided not to issue her a license in 2004.