POSTED: December 16th 2010
InDepth
'Greyhound' and a doping law change casts cloud over Spanish party
JOHN GOODBODY / Sports Features Communications
LONDON/MADRID, Dec 16: It had seemed as if Spain would be celebrating a wonderful year in international sport. Their footballers took the FIFA World Cup for the first time, Rafa Nadal won three of the four tennis Grand Slams and Alberto Contador finished first in the Tour de France for the third time.
However, for many years it had been believed that Spaniards in a variety of activities have been benefiting from taking performance enhancing drugs, suspicions that increased when the Operacion Puerto scandal broke four years ago.
This forced 13 cyclists to be pulled out of the 2006 Tour de France. Competitors in several other sports were implicated, although their identities have never been revealed.
The celebrations were well under way at the end of last summer when the first split in the Spanish facade of success appeared. During the Tour, it was found that Contador had been found positive for clenbuterol, an anabolic agent. He claimed that this derived from some beef that he had been eating and which had been brought across from Spain during the race. The case has still not been concluded but already the glory of his performance has been tarnished.
Worse was to come. On December 9, the Spanish police raided 15 properties across the country, including that of Marta Dominguez, the world steeplechase champion and darling of the country’s athletics followers.
What was nicknamed Operation Greyhound [Operacion Galgo] had followed the tapping of telephones and not only involves the alleged trafficking of drugs but also of money laundering.
Suspended
Reportedly, a search of the home of Dominguez, who is more than six months pregnant, discovered doping products and she was among those arrested, as was her coach and sports doctor. The Spanish Athletic Federation quickly suspended her from her post as vice-president, while the case continues.
She proclaims her innocence and says no doping products were found in her house. She is being investigated, not for taking products herself, something that she has also always denied, but for allegedly distributing them.
Another person, who was being interviewed by police, was Eufemiano Fuentes,a sports doctor, who was caught up in the Puerto scandal, although he again claimed his innocence this time,as did all the others who were arrested.
The 2007 case against Fuentes ended because, at the time, it was not a criminal offence to give people doping products for sporting purposes, unless the administration of those products could have harmed the athlete. Now the legislation has changed, enabling prison sentences to be given for the trafficking of doping products.
Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, said that the details of the Puerto case were never given to the international sports authorities but pointed out things should now be different.
He said: "I welcome and will always welcome the intervention of public authorities. So something like the Puerto case, something like the US Balco case, something like the Galgo (Greyhound) case is good for sport because sport does not have judicial means.
“We cannot issue a warrant. We cannot interrogate. We cannot tap phones. We cannot search luggage and we need to have that to crackdown on drug rings.”
The celebrations in Spain over the feats of their sportsmen and women in the last year are beginning to be slightly muted.
Keywords · Spain · Operacion Puerto · doping · Tour de France · cycling · Nadal · 2010 World Cup
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