Texas man charged with providing performance-enhancing drugs to Olympians

Federal prosecutors charged a Texas man with peddling performance-enhancing drugs to elite athletes in advance of last year’s Tokyo Olympics, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The complaint alleges Eric Lira, a self-proclaimed “kinesiologist and naturopathic” therapist, provided banned substances including human growth hormone and erythropoietin, or EPO, to the athletes. Lira, 41, is the proprietor of Med Sport LLC, an El Paso company. According to a LinkedIn profile, he has operated in Texas and Juárez, Mexico, which borders El Paso. It is not clear whether Lira has a lawyer, and he did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment. The court records suggest among his alleged clients was a Nigerian sprinter who was banned from the Tokyo Games after testing positive for human growth hormone.

Prosecutors said in a news release that Lira was the first person charged under federal anti-doping statutes giving American authorities global reach to indict synthetic cheaters in major sporting events. The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, named after the whistleblower in the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal, was signed into law in 2020. Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which was consulted during the investigation, said in a statement that Lira’s indictment was a “wonderful example of the power of whistleblowers coming forward to trusted anti-doping agencies and law enforcement to ensure the protection of the Olympic Games.” According to the complaint, the investigation began in July, weeks before the start of the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, when a subject referred to as “Individual-1” found packages of vials of apparent PEDs, including human growth hormone, in an athlete’s Florida home and provided photos of the drugs to the FBI. The packages included Mexican drugs bearing Lira’s return address that apparently had been mailed to an Olympian referred to in the records only as “Athlete-1.” In the days before the Tokyo Games, according to the complaint, that athlete tested positive for human growth hormone.