Alberto Contador handed two-year ban for doping and is stripped of 2010 Tour de France title by the CAS On that rest day there is no doubt that Contador ate a beef steak that had been bought just over the border in Spain by the Astana Team chef. A random blood test that day subsequently revealed a minute dose - 50 picograms per millilitre - of the controversial performance enhancing drug clenbuterol an amount which was 40 times below the minimum requirement of detection capability required by WADA. Contador was suspended without prejudice by the UCI and, as is the norm, they handed the case over to the National Federation with the Spanish Federation initially invoking a one-year ban. Contador immediately appealed and the Spanish Federation appeal committee re-examined the case before deciding there was no case to answer and quashed the ban. The UCI and WADA were not happy with this about turn and took the only action available to them and in March last year referred the decision of the Spanish Federation to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) for a final ruling. The case, much delayed, was eventually held in November last year with the decision delayed until today on a number of technical details one of which was strong objections to their being an Israeli chairman of the committee, Efriam Barak, at a time when Contador's team was taking place in a winter training camp in Israel. Barak also appeared to antagonise some WADA and UCI lawyers for ruling that a number of their designated scientific and medical experts could not appear before the court to give "admissible" evidence. Clenbuterol does not occur naturally in the human body but has become the most controversial performance enhancing drug of them all. It does appear with some regularity in the food chain in contaminated meat because farmers feed it to their livestock to promote high protein and commercially more valuable meat. As a result it can be ingested innocently and unknowingly and amid the general confusion various sports have been treating it differently. Football in the form of FIBA, in two high profile cases in Mexico last year, has chosen to ignore clenbuterol altogether while in January 2011, the German Table-tennis Federation acquitted Dimitrij Ovtcharov and, although WADA initially announced it would appeal, it ultimately failed to do so and accepted the food contamination defence of the athlete. Similar clenbuterol cases of athletes testing positive for clenbuterol and being cleared on the grounds that it was accidentally ingested include Alessandro Colo (Italian cyclist), Dimitrij Ovtcharov (German table-tennis player), Li Fuyu (Chinese cyclist), Lainer Bueno (Major league baseball player) and most recently Phillip Nielsen (Danish cyclist). Just before the CAS case in November, Contador's lawyer Andy Ramos, speaking to Telegraph Sport, said: "Alberto does not use performance enhancing drugs and that is the end of the matter. Suspending the current Tour de France champion when we know he ingested the banned substance through a tainted steak is an injustice of tragic proportions. The amount of clenbuterol found in Alberto Contador's urine offered no performance enhancement at all. The International Cycling Union (UCI) and the Spanish Cycling Federation (RFEC) both stressed that the amount of clenbuterol found would not have improved his chances of winning the Tour de France. In fact, clenbuterol adds muscle and bulk, the exact opposite of the result that a Tour de France rider would seek who is about to ride up mountains. Ramos and his team though have failed to convince CAS of any of this and the career of Contador, generally considered the most talented Grand Tour rider of his generation, is now in tatters.