A wall of discretion and minimal leaks reject all investigations to delve deeper into Oier Lazkano’s biological passport: when? How much? AS? where? – and the strategies before the trial which will decide on the guilt or innocence of his defense – the Venetian lawyer Fabio Pavone, who has at heart the interests and problems of all the riders represented by the manager Giuseppe Acquadro, such as Nairo Quintana among others -, of the Prosecutor’s Office – International Testing Agency (ITA), the company to which the International Cycling Union (UCI) has taken over in matters of doping – and of Movistar and Red Bull, the cyclist’s teams Victorian for the last four years.
The same silence, almost, stops the journalist who meets Lazkano himself, or any other athlete, his doctors, coaches or managers when they want to know the values of their passport. At most, someone who has access to the dossier curiously let slip that it is not a big problem, that many experts saw nothing strange in the four anomalous values - all found in checks carried out during the race – which led to Lazkano’s provisional suspension.
The cyclist regrets in private that intimate data such as the results of his blood tests are inaccessible to him, and the managers of the teams for which athletes with control problems race regret in public that the anti-doping authorities do not alert them in time, as the police would warn a shopkeeper that a shop assistant is rummaging in his drawer, to act before the damage to the image and good reputation of his sponsor is irreparable. Meanwhile, the Andorran cycling federation, in which the 120 foreign professional cyclists resident in the Pyrenean country, including Lazkano, are registered, regrets having to pay around 8,000 euros for each anti-doping case that the UCI opens for one of the cyclists holding an Andorran licence.
“Cyclists’ real-time access to their passport data was removed from the ADAMS platform in October 2021. Cyclists can still request their data from the ITA, which will share it with them under strict conditions and not via ADAMS,” they say from the ITA. “In any case, the cyclist who requests and receives their data can subsequently share it with their team if they wish or need to, but the ITA does not send any data directly to the teams.” Access was closed, they explain, because during the investigation in Austria into Operation Aderlass – a blood transfusion network – they realized that some athletes were monitoring their data with the help of support staff to calibrate their anti-doping strategy and avoid detection. The passport (or ABP), we remember, draws a specific profile for each athlete with the relationship between hemoglobin and reticulocytes (red blood cells). Analyzes that give values outside the line traced by secret software are considered anomalous. “Furthermore,” they point out to the ITA, “we have evidence to show that cyclists are sometimes forced to reveal their blood data to their teams or managers, which leads to undue stigma and discrimination.”
It is so difficult to obtain positive results in traditional tests that in the fight against doping anything goes. It is also worth eliminating the rights of defense – not to testify against oneself, to lie, to remain silent: it amounts to obstruction, manipulation, punishable with years of suspension – and some of the so-called fundamental rights such as the secrecy of communications, the inviolability of the home without a court order, the confidentiality of telephones and computers, and it is also worth it that members of the Central Operational Unit of the Guardia Civil, for example, actively collaborate with their investigative and coercive force with private agencies such as the AMA, ITA or AIU, which deals with athletics. The police are only looking for what is behind the athlete – distribution channels of prohibited substances, suppliers, doctors – the people to whom the law that penalizes doping can be applied. The athlete, who can only receive administrative sanctions – the law considers him a victim: consumption is not sanctioned – is, simply, a link in his investigation towards a more attractive objective. Thus, in the Operation Ílex investigation into the activities of the Extremaduran doctor Marcos Maynar and the former director Vicente Belda, the doping of the Colombian Superman López was discovered, later suspended for four years.
Such capacity for action, superior to that of the police in any operation, always under judicial control, confuses the athletes’ lawyers and scares the jurists, who raise the alarm. “I believe that access to an athlete’s personal communications should not be granted without the necessary guarantees. Telling the athlete that he is being asked to access his computer and his telephone, whether or not he can accept such access, and relying on article 2.5 of the World Code, which refers to the manipulation of controls or tests, is a delicate issue,” reflects Borja Osés, a lawyer who led, among others, the defense of Mo Katir, doubly sanctioned for three localization failures. out-of-competition checks and to falsify the date of the boarding pass to justify an absence due to an unexpected trip. “If you do not voluntarily agree to provide them, the consequences will have to be established, especially if you bear in mind that, in our case, access to personal communications requires judicial authorization which must be justified.”
If Osés, from experience, knows how the anti-doping police spend their time in cases that deserve only administrative sanctions, says Rafael Caballero, professor of administrative law at the Complutense University and president of the Spanish Anti-Doping Sanctions Committee, a person “unfamiliar with this type of aggressive measures to persecute doping”. It surprises and surprises him. “I find it astonishing that they can take measures that are so invasive of personal privacy. It’s one thing for the athlete to want to cite and prove something in his defense and provide his call log or WhatsApp, duly audited, so that it is known that there is no manipulation, and we recently cleared an athlete for demonstrating contradiction to what was stated in a verification form,” he explains. “But adopting these measures coercively without judicial authorization appears disproportionate and not compatible with the fundamental right to inviolability of communications, to personal privacy, to the presumption of innocence and not to plead guilty. As everyone already knows, a witness is obliged to tell the truth, but a suspect can lie.”
Caballero adds that it does not appear that Article 2.5 can accommodate measures of this caliber and that, in any case, specific legal authorization would be required to proceed with dumping and a judicial review of their suitability on a case-by-case basis. But it always comes back to fear. “Another thing is the coercive power that these organizations have, in the sense that if you don’t respect what they prescribe they can separate you or create problems for you,” he concludes.
