Spain’s head of its official anti-doping body, AEPSAD, Enrique Gómez Bastida has denied widespread reports that the long-awaited verdict on the Operacion Puerto case missed WADA’s 10-year deadline on its the statute of limitations by a bare three weeks.
Operacion Puerto’s ‘start-date’ - the day of the raids and seizure of banned products in Madrid and elsewhere - was on May 23rd 2006 meaning the ten year ‘anniversary’ for Puerto fell just a few weeks before Tuesday’s final verdict was published by the Madrid courts.
As a result, when Tuesday’s verdict was published it was widely reported that WADA’s current ten-year statute of limitations on doping offences had been missed by less than a month. The implication of such reports was that had the deadline not been passed and once identification of the 211 blood bags at the centre of Puerto has - as is finally permitted - taken place, then more suspensions for athletes implicated in Spain’s biggest ever doping case and one which rocked international cycling to its core, could have taken place. Up to now, just five cases have been confirmed under anti-doping regulations to date: Jan Ullrich, Jorg Jaksche, Michele Scarponi, Ivan Basso and Alejandro Valverde.
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However, in an interview with Cyclingnews, Gómez Bastida argued in fact the time limit for potential bans for sports people on Puerto had expired in 2014, given WADA’s current statute of limitations came into effect in 2015.
According to the anti-doping chief, longstanding doping affairs which had already reached the previous statute of limitation maximum of eight years - as was the case of Puerto, dating from 2006 - were declared to be exempt from the extended time limit of a decade.
“That [ten year maximum missed by Puerto by weeks] is the general idea, but in fact that’s not the case,” Gómez Bastida told Cyclingnews. “The new ten year statute of limitations is only applicable, according to the WADA code of 2015, to those cases, like Puerto, which had not already passed the previous limit of eight years.”
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
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