Bernard Sainz

Bernard Sainz, a.k.a. Dr Mabuse, (born Rennes, France, 1 September 1943) is an unlicensed sports doctor who achieved great success in horse racing and cycling.

He was jailed for falsely practising medicine, particularly in cycle racing, and received other sentences for doping-related charges, which he consistently denied.

Sainz first consulted a homeopathic doctor in 1956 after persistent sinusitis.

Sainz said: He (the homeopath) was the only one who could cure it (sinusitis) and I remember a doctor who was different, whose approach intrigued and interested me enormously.

Sainz says he studied for three years at the homeopathic school of St Jacques in Paris and at the national homeopathy centre, from which he said he qualified with the praise of the examiners.

He has always insisted that he practised homeopathy in treating racing cyclists.

He accepts in his biography that his qualifications in homeopathy and acupuncture are not recognised in France.

Bernard Sainz came to notice at horse racing tracks.

Bernard Sainz began cycle-racing in 1958 when he was 15, riding a race on rollers.

He won a bicycle as fastest rider.

He joined the UC Créteil a club in the suburbs of Paris.

One of his first training companions was Pierre Trentin, a future sprint champion.

In 1964 he came third in the French students' championship in his home town.

The winner was Jean-Marie Leblanc, who became a professional and then organiser of the Tour de France.

He stopped racing after crashing in a motor-paced race on the velodrome at Grenoble

Bernard Sainz returned to cycling in 1972, joining the Mercier team when Louis Caput replaced Antonin Magne as manager.

Caput approached Edmond Mercier, the bicycle-maker behind Poulidor's team, and asked to bring Sainz into the team management.

Mercier agreed, said Sainz, because he was already treating Mercier for his own health problems.

Mercier had also brought in the insurance company, GAN, as main sponsor.

GAN, said Sainz, wanted Raymond Poulidor, who had said the previous year that he would not race any more.

Sainz said:

Louis Caput couldn't stand the idea that such a monument of cycling could leave the sport by the back door.

Poulidor agreed to meet me, although insisting that his decision to stop was irrevocable.

In the style of a true Limousin, Poupou was reserved and careful, even defiant, but very quickly I sensed that he was attentive to what I was suggesting.

I took his pulse for a long time as is the tradition in acupuncture, I examined the iris of his eyes according to the principles of iridology, and the soles of his feet according to the principles of reflexology.

Sainz continued:

In 1988 one of his three-year-olds, Soft Machine, caused a surprise by winning a big race three days after losing an unimportant one for which he had been favourite.

The suspicion was that Sainz had doped the horse to run faster, but nothing was found.

Sainz said: Vets threw themselves on Soft Machine to take a dope test, sure that he was doped.

He had blood analyses and even, it seems, a muscular biopsy.

It was the training that he gave horses and the instructions that he gave his jockeys, he said in his autobiography, that made his horse successful.

Sainz said he was surprised, with his cycling background, to see how lightly horses were trained.

The accepted theory was that a horse should race and then rest for 18 days.

For someone who had come from a milieu where men were capable of racing 200km a day for three weeks, it was another world!

The idea of interval training was unknown.

In high-level sport, the difference comes in mastering details.

You have to understand all the parametres likely to influence performance.

It was around this time that Sainz acquired the nickname Dr Mabuse, after the villain in a series of German books and films.

Sainz was questioned in an inquiry into possible doping of horses.

Horse-racing, Sainz said, was an area where he had made few friends and which didn't lack dangerous people.