Spain leaves others to do its dirty work in war against doping

The stain on Spain is shown up again

PARIS — Lance Armstrong could not have been more wrong.

Five years ago, after a picturesque but particularly tough ride in the French Alps, the soon-to-be seven-time winner of the Tour de France declared that Alejandro Valverde had all the makings of cycling’s Next Big Thing.

The Spaniard, then aged 25 and racing his first Tour, was one of just three riders who managed to stick with Armstrong on the winding climb to the Courchevel ski station on that July day in 2005. At the top, Valverde even out-sprinted the champion to the line. Armstrong was impressed.

“A guy like him — I’m not blowing smoke — could be the future of cycling,” he said. “He’s a complete rider, a smart rider and a patient rider.”

In fact, we learned this week, Valverde was none of those things. Instead, as the Court of Arbitration for Sport demonstrated, he was really a relic of the bad and, hopefully, bygone era when riders doped themselves to the gills and largely got away with it.

In a 47-page decision, the court’s three arbitrators unanimously ruled that Valverde “engaged in doping practices” with the help of Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, who was the contact for crooked riders and other athletes until police in Spain broke up his doping network in May 2006.

It was a ghoulish business. Fuentes stored bags of riders’ blood so it could be re-injected in competition when they needed a performance boost. Bags got coded labels, some based on the names of riders’ dogs. Italian rider Ivan Basso was “Birillo.” Jorg Jaksche of Germany was “Bella.”

Although he denied it, the arbitration court heard that Valverde owned a dog called Piti. And Piti was the code on a bag of plasma which DNA tests confirmed was his.

The tragedy here is not just that such a promising rider accepted Fuentes’ services but that it has taken so long to weed him out. Despite the suspicions that have hung over him since 2006, Valverde has happily continued competing, notably winning the 2009 Tour de Spain, and collected a rich wage from his Caisse d’Epargne team.

Spain has done a lamentably poor job of following up on the mountains of evidence uncovered by its police who seized fridgeloads of blood bags and stashes of steroids and hormones, and filmed athletes arriving at a Madrid apartment building apparently to have blood extracted or to pick up performance-enhancing drugs.

Operation Puerto, as it was called, should have been a triumph for anti-doping. Instead, it has been an agonizingly frustrating example of how cheats can wriggle off the hook when those who should be catching them don’t work together and when countries don’t have tough enough laws.

Spanish authorities left others to wash their dirty laundry. Valverde would likely never have been called to account had it not been for officials in Italy who have sunk their teeth into this case with the determination of bulldogs.

It was they who cornered Basso, the 2005 Tour runner-up behind Armstrong and winner of the 2006 Tour of Italy. They got him to confess his links to Fuentes by telling him they would use DNA to tie him to one of the bags of seized blood.

With Valverde, the Italians bided their time until July 21, 2008, when the Tour de France that he was riding in made a brief swing through Italy. They took samples of his blood and then matched his DNA to a sample taken from the bag labeled “18 Valv. (Piti)” that was seized in Spain.

The onus now shifts to the UCI, cycling’s governing body, to belatedly get Valverde off the roads.

Valverde is already banned from competing in Italy, a punishment that the arbitration court confirmed. Buoyed by that ruling, UCI officials say they are determined to extend the ban worldwide. They hope to keep him out until at least 2012 — after the Italian ban expires in May 2011.

The UCI and the Italians should be congratulated for not letting Puerto drop. It would have been easy for them to do so, given the resistance from Spain and from Valverde’s lawyers.

A look back to the results that day in 2005 when Armstrong’s crystal ball failed him reads like a who’s who of dopers. It shows how bad cheating was in cycling and how much progress has since been made — even if there is still a way to go.

Third over the line in Courchevel was Mickael Rasmussen. Basso was fifth, Eddy Mazzoleni was seventh, Andrei Kashechkin was 10th, Floyd Landis was 11th and Leonardo Piepoli was 12th.

They have all since served or are serving two-year doping bans.

John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org.