Operacion Puerto - Court rules that blood bags must be released to Wada and UCI

At last, some good news in this case, good for clean athletes from whom suspicion may be removed, and good for the general battle vs. drug-taking in sport https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jun/14/operation-puerto-blood-bags-must-be-released-judge-madrid

On another note, it seems to me that the single most effective deterrent is if authorities are able to hold samples for ages on the basis that they can test them when the technology has caught up with the drugs and retrospectively ban athletes - that's the only way to put doubt in the minds of would-be cheaters (and perhaps more importantly their coaches, who want a long career) that cheats will be caught eventually.

We shall see what transpires - quite possibly an appeal, but by whom......?

Will be very interesting to see what WADA do. It's quite old now though so I'd expect anyone implicated to be at the end of their career.

Quite - thinking out loud, if I were an athlete who had a pretty good idea that one of the bags was identifiable as my blood (and accurate identity may be Wada's first problem), I'd look at insisting on Doctor - client privilege, and I would have thought that in order to overcome that Wada need to prove at least prima facie evidence of wrong-doing.  

There may be a few mountains to climb before we ever get to find out whose blood might be in those bags.

I'd like to think that there are a few cheats sweating at the news though....

If the blood bags are released and can be tied to a specific person would they actually result in any conviction anyway? Surely at best it's extremely suspicious and more evidence (say from Fuentes) would be necessary before anyone could be punished?

... and Fuentes has shown willingness to document/tell his side of the story. I still suspect the viability of such samples, if not stored properly.

laverfan wrote:... and Fuentes has shown willingness to document/tell his side of the story. I still suspect the viability of such samples, if not stored properly.

They're frozen, so there won't be any problem.

It's not like they're testing them for banned substances. The bags are also labelled (albeit somewhat cryptically)

As DJ says, this case is about blood for use in homologous blood transfusions ('blood doping'), so it is not a question of what is in the blood, merely whose it is (although if you look back at the history of Operacion Puerto, before the Spanish courts tried their damnedest to protect someone*, about 100 of the bags were tested and found to include EPO and other doping products within the blood). DNA would still be reliable from the bags, even if you couldn't necessarily trust other doping results now.

Never understood how this became so attached to Nadal - if there was someone from Spanish tennis involved, I'd be more suspicious of the older players (the likes of Moya or Ferrero, or at least their generation). Always seemed to me a case of 2+2= 473 with regard to Rafa's involvement.

*Pretty sure that would not be Alberto Contador or any of their other cyclists - not a big enough power base in Spain (otherwise Fuentes would never have been caught). Not sure even Rafa would be a big enough star to merit the legal collusion that has gone on. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that there is only one sport that would be well enough connected to almost get the blood bags destroyed and at least unidentified for a decade - a sport that in the years following Puerto, Spain has done remarkably well in internationally...

@d-h - I am absolutely with you on the sport which may be most worried.  I read somewhere that the bags are from only a handful of athletes, of which something like 2/3 are cyclists, so we are not talking about many individuals risking exposure.  I guess if they are from a sport which has thus far snuck under the doping radar (more for bad reasons than good) the significance for the sport will be wider than the names.  Then there's the risk that Fuentes starts croaking.  If I were him I'd check my brake cables each morning and use a different route to work every day.

As I said in my opening post - there may be a number of clean athletes who are longing for the names to be released so as to strip away another reason for suspicion of them.

barry

I've read something similar with regard to the numbers of athletes involved - 200 or so blood bags but only about 35-40 individuals involved, about 2/3 cyclists and 1/3 track and field athletes + 1 'other' (I suspect either cross country skiing or speed skating). Not sure how anyone can know this for certain, but I suspect some strategic leak through the Spanish media.

Interestingly, Wikipedia lists 40 cyclists whose names have been linked to Fuentes, but the numbers above suggests at least some of them aren't represented within the blood bags.

Fuentes is not the only one directly linked to cyclists. Ferrari is also linked with cyclists.

This was last updated in March, 2015.