Fernando Signorini's memory of Diego Maradona's room is that it looked like a drugstore. The number 10 personal physical trainer asked him what the bottles were on the dressing table at the hotel where the Argentine national team was staying in Boston, during the 1994 World Cup, in the United States. Only one person knew. And it wasn't Maradona himself.
"No one had ever heard of Daniel Cerrini. He was a stranger until Diego showed up with him at the training ground and demanded that he go to the World Cup", recalls Roberto Peidró, the doctor at the AFA (Argentine Football Association).
The path was drawn for one of the most controversial moments in the history of World Cups: Maradona's doping incident. Cerrini would go from an obscure character to the protagonist of a traumatic episode in Argentinian football.
"To this day I find it all very strange. I don't know if anyone got paid, if it was a political issue or if there's any other side we are not aware of. The only certainty I have is that Diego did not get doped up on purpose", Fernando Signorini tells Folha, 28 years after the episode. Maradona was caught in the anti-doping test with ephedrine, a substance that offers energy stimulation, improves athletic performance, and helps to lose weight.
The test was carried out after the victory over Nigeria in the second round of the group phase.
Today, everyone acknowledges that they should have questioned the player more often about what he was ingesting, advised by Cerrini. Nobody wanted to go against him. Maradona was more than just the team's captain, and his authority went beyond that of Alfio Basile, the coach.
One argument of the conspiracy theories that emerged later about the doping incident is that Maradona had been taking Ripped Fast pills for months, had been tested, and had never come back positive. The issue was that they ran out of the product during the preparation for the World Cup, already in the United States. At Cerrini's request and Maradona's order, the team's technical committee bought more capsules of a product that would be identical, called Ripped Fuel. But these had ephedrine. Nobody noticed.
As soon as the doping news broke, the national team's doctors stormed into Cerrini's room and held him against the wall. "What did you give him? What did you give him?", they shouted, as Peidró remembers. The bodybuilder was soon removed from the base camp and sent back to Argentina.
Upon landing in Buenos Aires, he found the country in commotion. Without the presence of Maradona, the team was defeated by Bulgaria in its group and eliminated in the round of 16 by Romania.
Translated by Cassy Dias