Sport has such an embarrassment of riches when it comes to scandals that the very last thing it needs is for an old one to be dredged up. But, at this most inopportune moment, that is exactly what could be about to happen. By the end of this month, a final decision about Operation Puerto is due from the Spanish courts. It was almost a decade ago that this scandal began and until the recent IAAF doping story unceremoniously usurped it, Puerto had the potential to be the biggest doping scandal that sport had ever seen.
Operation Puerto has dragged on for so long that many observers have forgotten about it and those who haven’t assume that it has been resolved in some way or another. So to suggest that anyone is awaiting this month’s final verdict with baited breath would be overstating it somewhat.
Just to recap in case you are one of the gazillions who have ceased to care about Operation Puerto- the code name of the Spanish Police investigation into Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes. It began in May 2006 when blood bags were seized from the offices of Fuentes, the former cycling doctor who was known by some of his patients as ‘Dr Blood’ and in the raids, police discovered 186 blood bags belonging to professional athletes as well as EPO, steroids and growth hormone. Some of the cyclists who were implicated were Tyler Hamilton, Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich but it was not, in fact, the names of the cyclists that caused the most waves. Rather, it was the revelation that Fuentes’ clients included athletes from sports other than cycling. And this is where it got really interesting; Fuentes claimed that he worked with athletes from a range of sports, including tennis, football, athletics and boxing with a Spanish cyclist and client of Fuentes, Jesus Manzano, claiming that he regularly saw “well-known footballers” in the doctor’s waiting room when he was there for his red blood cell top-ups.
But the prospect of athletes from these other sports being named seemed to disappear almost three years ago when a Spanish court ruled for the 186 blood bags which had been seized from Fuentes’ offices to be destroyed although the doctor was still handed a one-year suspended sentence for endangering public health. The court’s decision was met with howls of derision and accusations of a cover-up. On hearing the verdict in 2013, Andy Murray tweeted: “Case is beyond a joke. Why would court order blood bags to be destroyed? #coverup.” Many agreed with his sentiments.
Yet a sliver of hope remains that the athletes who were treated by Fuentes will be identified. After almost three years of appeals by Spain’s anti-doping authority, AEPSAD, against the court’s verdict to destroy the blood bags, a final decision whether to destroy them or not is due by the end of this month. If the appeals fail, it is all over and Operation Puerto will be put to bed forever. But if the appeal is successful, Operation Puerto will be reignited and it has the potential to explode spectacularly.
It’s an interesting one. This time last year, I thought that closing the case was perhaps the best thing to do. Yes, it would have meant that the public would never have known definitively if any of the countless rumours regarding to whom those blood bags belonged were ever true. And it possibly meant that some of the athletes mentioned in those whispered accusations were implicated unjustly, never to be cleared. But I felt that sometimes, you just have to close the book and move on. Stop looking backwards and begin looking forward towards how to achieve clean sport in the future. Even if specific names were revealed, nothing could be done- WADA’s eight year statute of limitations had expired so there was little that could be done in terms of sanctioning any particular individual.
But I don’t hold that view anymore. If the blood bags are indeed destroyed then it will be another nail in the coffin for sport and another dent in the fast-eroding belief that the public hold in clean and fair sport. That’s if any belief at all still remains.
What the last twelve months have shown us is that sport has been able to be corrupted because of a lack of transparency. Both FIFA and the IAAF operated under a veil of secrecy that allowed such outrageously nefarious behaviours to go unchallenged. Even tennis has been criticised this week because in the wake of the match-fixing scandal, it was noted that the Tennis Integrity Unit actually tells no one what it does. Sport can only take so many blows before it is unable to recover again. What a fatal blow looks like, no one yet knows but if the Operation Puerto case closes surrounded by accusations of yet more secrecy then we will be another step closer to the public losing its trust in sport forever and perhaps irreparably.
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