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At the same Olympics, she finished 4th in the road time trial, just two seconds shy of securing a bronze medal.
At the same Olympics, she finished 4th in the road time trial, just two seconds shy of securing a bronze medal.
Longo is still active in cycling as of 2011 and is widely considered one of the greatest female cyclists of all time. She is famous for her competitive nature and her longevity in a sport where some of her competitors were not yet born during her first Olympic competition in 1984. She was selected to compete for France in the 2008 Olympics, her seventh Olympic Games.
She had stated that this would be her final participation in the Olympics.
Longo was born in Annecy, Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps where she began her athletic career as a downhill skier. Doping affairs
In September 1987 Longo tested positive for ephederine following a 3 km world record attempt in Colorado Springs.
She served a 1-month ban for this offense. In September 2011, French sports daily L"Equipe reported that Longo"s husband, Patrice Ciprelli, had purchased her the performance-enhancing drug EPO from China via former American professional cyclist Joe Papp.
Ciprelli claimed that he purchased the EPO for his own personal use.
The charges prompted an investigation of Longo by the Fédération Française de Cyclisme (FFC) which cleared her in a November 2011 statement. Longo also missed three doping tests in this same time period. Normally this would be penalized the same as a positive test but AFLD had failed to notify Longo that she would be targeted for testing in that year, thus letting her official
In the Women"s road race, she finished 24th, 33 seconds behind winner Nicole Cooke, who was one year old when Longo first rode in the Olympics. She is currently number two on the all-time list of French female summer or winter Olympic medal winners, with a total of four medals, which is one less than the total number won by the fencer Laura Flessel-Colovic. Within a few months, Longo won the French road race Championship at the age of 21. She competed both in road and track bicycle racing events, and is an Olympic gold-medalist and thirteen-time world champion.
