According to the Gazzetta dello Sport's Valerio Piccioni, Ivan Basso has confessed his involvement in Operación Puerto to the antidoping prosecutor Ettore Torri of the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI). Today in Rome, CONI issued communiqué saying "Ivan Basso has largely admitted his responsibility relative to Operación Puerto and has provided the maximum collaboration to clarify the facts relative to his involvement."Basso, as you'll remember, is the rider who had to sit out last year's TdF as a result of the original Puerto files and was signed to ride for Discovery this year. Last week he resigned from Discovery once new allegations surfaced. I didn't like the Basso signing to begin with, and I'll be interested to see what, if any, fallout results from this latest news.
There is a ton of background on this, but essentially a Spanish paper unearthed a doping ring centered around a doctor in Spain (Fuentes) who had many riders as clients. Authorities have seized Fuentes' logbooks (with coded entries) and a number of blood bags. They are in the process of tying the coded names back to real riders. This is the same scandal that enmeshed Jan Ullrich last year.
Interestingly, new allegations surfaced last week with more riders implicated. One implicated rider of note is Tyler Hamilton who is currently riding for Tinker in Europe. I wonder what his defence for this one will be.
Since the Spanish police have the blood bags in their possession, I imagine it would be fairly easy for a wrongly accused rider to clear his name by allowing the suspected bag to be matched to his own DNA. I assume that riders won't want to do that because (1) the precedent they'd be setting (2) the fact that they're guilty. We'll see how many come out and demand to be tested once accused.
UPDATE:
Basso today unveiled his "I didn't inhale" explanation:
"It was only attempted doping," said 29 year-old Ivan Basso to a conference room full of journalists and photographers in Milan's Hotel Michelangelo. The 2006 Giro d'Italia winner called the press conference following his admission of involvement in the Operación Puerto blood doping scandal...
"In my career I have never used doping products or resorted to blood transfusions," Basso claimed, according to La Gazzetta dello Sport.
2 comments:
If I recall, there was a big bru-ha-ha when Discovery signed Basso.
Also, if Tyler is implicated, he's subject to a lifetime ban, right? Can he argue that Puerto was at the same time as his last alleged violation?
I think that if Tyler is found to be in deep on this too, he's done regardless - I don't think that any team would want to take a chance of having something else from his past blow up on them.
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