Johann Mühlegg

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Medal record
Men's cross country skiing
Olympic Games
Disqualified	2002 Salt Lake City	10 km + 10 km combined pursuit
Disqualified	2002 Salt Lake City	30 km freestyle mass start
Disqualified	2002 Salt Lake City	50 km classical
World Championships
Gold	2001 Lahti	50 km
Silver	2001 Lahti	10 km + 10 km combined pursuit

Johann Mühlegg (born August 8, 1970) is a German-born top level cross-country skier who has competed in international competitions first representing Germany and then Spain, after becoming a Spanish citizen in 1999. He was excluded and disqualified from the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City due to doping.

Mühlegg participated for Germany in the 1992, 1994, and 1998 Winter Olympics, though he began having trouble with the country's ski federation in 1993. From the beginning, Mühlegg singled himself out, at one point accusing German head coach Georg Zipfel of "damaging him spiritually" (the so-called Spiritistenaffäre). He was thrown out of the team in 1995, but was re-instated later. But from that moment on, the ever-eccentric Mühlegg insisted on taking a flask of holy water at him at all times, and trusting only his Portuguese cleaning woman/ chaperon Justina Agostino. In the end, Mühlegg was branded as a team cancer and was thrown out.^[1]

After being ejected from the national team after the 1998 Games, his good relations with members of the Spanish cross-country skiing team, in particular Juan Jesús Gutierrez and Haritz Zunzunegui, opened the door for Mühlegg to obtain a Spanish citizenship.

In late 1999, competing for Spain, he won a World Cup race for the first time. At the 2001 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in Lahti, he won two medals with a silver in the 10 km + 10 km combined pursuit (stepping up when the original medalist Jari Isometsä was disqualified for hemohes use), and a gold in the 50 km freestyle race. In the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City Mühlegg won gold medals in the 30 km freestyle and the 10 km + 10 km pursuit races, the successes gaining him congratulations from King Juan Carlos of Spain.

Mühlegg finished first in the 50 km classical race held on the final Saturday of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games on February 23, 2002, but was disqualified from that race and was expelled from the Games the next day, after testing positive for darbepoetin¹ (a medicine which boosts red blood cell count; the substance was not banned at the time since it had only recently been developed).

Following the darbepoetin scandal, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) initially let Mühlegg keep his gold medals from the first two races, but in December 2003 a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) found that these medals should also be withdrawn. The CAS remitted this case as well as similar ones involving Olga Danilova and Larissa Lazutina (both from Russia) to the IOC Executive Board, which confirmed the rulings in February 2004.

[edit] Notes

Traces of darbepoetin were found in a random urine test February 21. Before the 50 km race on February 23, a random test for hemoglobin levels found Mühlegg above the limit; a second test five minutes later was below the limit, and he was allowed to compete. At the end of the race he came on extremely strong (and, as was later shown, unnaturally strong) to beat Mikhail Ivanov of Russia by 14.9 seconds.