The news broke only on Saturday and now Irish marathon runner Martin Fagan has admitted to taking the banned substance EPO.
In an interview in today’s Irish Times, the Mullingar man confirms that he took the illegal blood booster erythropoietin and that it was financial and mental pressure that drove him to cheat.
Fagan, who competed in the Beijing Olympic marathon for Ireland, came close to hitting the qualifying time for London in Chicago back in October but he had to pull out with last than a mile to go. That broke his resolve to stay clean.
“If I’d only got to the line I could have run sub-2:12, and a London qualifier. Instead I got nothing out. No money. A DNF next to my name. And no one cared. That really broke me. The final nail in the coffin, really,” he tells Ian O’Riordan in a gripping interview.
“I was just about surviving, financially. I know in every sport there are the haves and have-nots, but I was below the poverty line. My only hope was to qualify for London.”
Fagan also suffers from depression and while looking at some fairly grim message boards on suicide, he decided instead to look for EPO.
“Do an internet search for ‘how to take EPO’ and you’ll get pages of results. I ordered the cheapest stuff I could find, some completely generic brand, and just put it on the credit card. I paid about $500, actually on some European website. I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was a two-week supply, but I do know you’d need to be on it for longer than that.”
Fagan puts down his decision to take the drug to his mental state too, knowing he would get caught.
“I’m not a doctor. But I was already in meltdown. And I know no one takes EPO anymore this way. Maybe 10 years ago, yeah. But it’s so silly, the way I did it, because you’re certain to get caught.”
The testers duly arrived, by coincidence, the day after he first took EPO and that was the test that came back positive.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he admits. “It’s cost me my career. I know I never done drugs during a race, but it’s over now, for me. I’m not bitter about it because I know it’s my fault. There will always be athletes talking about drugs, and it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the drug talk. And wonder, ‘what if?’ There’s always some suspicion there, finger-pointing. But I have never once been offered drugs, and I’ve never seen another athlete take drugs. And it’s definitely not the reason I took EPO.”
