A wall of discretion and minimal leaks rejects all investigations to delve deeper into Oier Lazkano’s biological passport – when? as? as? where?—and the strategies before the trial that decides his guilt or innocence of his defense –the Venetian lawyer Fabio Pavone, who looks after the interests and problems of all the riders represented by manager Giuseppe Acquadro, such as Nairo Quintana among others–, of the prosecution –International Testing Agency (ITA), a company to which the International Cycling Union (UCI) has subrogated doping issues—and of Movistar and Red Bull, the Victorian cycling teams for the last four years.
The same silence, almost, holds the journalist that Lazkano himself, or any other athlete, his doctors, coaches or managers encounter when they want to know the value of his passport. At most, some with access to the dossier curiously let it slip, which is no big deal, that many experts saw nothing strange in the four anomalous values - all of them found in controls carried out in competition – that led to Lazkano’s provisional suspension.
The cyclist privately regrets that data as intimate as the results of tests on his own blood are inaccessible to him, and those responsible for the teams where athletes with control problems race publicly regret that the anti-doping authorities did not alert them in time, as the police would warn a shopkeeper that a salesman is reaching into his drawer, to act before the damage to the image and good reputation of his sponsor is irreparable. Meanwhile, the Andorra cycling federation, in which the 120 foreign professional cyclists residing in the Pyrenean country are registered, including Lazkano, regrets having to pay around 8,000 euros for each doping case that the UCI opens against one of the cyclists who have an Andorran license.
“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 through ADAMS,” the ITA states. “In any case, the cyclist who requests and receives their data can later share it with their team if they wish or if necessary, but the ITA does not send any data directly to the teams.” Access was closed, they explain, because during the investigation in Austria of Operation Aderlass – a transfusion network – they understood that some athletes were monitoring their data with the help of support staff to calibrate their doping strategy and avoid detection. The passport (or ABP), remember, outlines a specific profile of each athlete with the proportion of hemoglobin and reticulocytes (red blood cells). Analyzes that provide values outside the line drawn by secret software are considered anomalous. “Furthermore”, they point out at ITA, “we have evidence that shows that cyclists are sometimes pressured to reveal their blood data to their teams or managers, which leads to undue stigmatization 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 testifying against oneself, lying, remaining silent: equivalent to obstruction, manipulation, punishable by years of suspension – and some of the so-called fundamental rights such as the secrecy of communications, the inviolability of one’s home without a court order, the privacy of telephones and computers, and it is also worth that members of the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard, for example, actively collaborate with their investigative and coercive force with private agencies such as the AMA, the ITA or the AIU, responsible for athletics. The police only look for what is behind the athlete – distribution channels for 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 penalized – is simply a link in his investigation towards a more palatable objective. Thus, in the Operation Ílex investigation into the activities of Extremaduran doctor Marcos Maynar and former director Vicente Belda, the doping of Colombian Superman López was discovered, who was subsequently 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 due guarantees. Telling the athlete that he is being asked to access his computer and telephone, whether or not he accepts this access, and based on article 2.5 of the World Code, regarding the manipulation of controls or tests, is a delicate issue”, reflects Borja Osés, lawyer who led, among others, the defense of Mo Katir, who was doubly sanctioned for three location failures in out-of-competition controls and falsifying the date of a boarding pass to justify an absence due to unexpected travel. “If you do not voluntarily agree to provide them, the consequences must be determined, especially if you keep in mind that, in our case, access to personal communications requires judicial authorization that must be motivated.”
If Osés, from experience, knows how the anti-doping police spend their time in cases that only deserve administrative sanctions, for Rafael Caballero, professor of Administrative Law at the Complutense University and president of the Spanish Anti-Doping Sanctioning Committee, he is a person “little familiar with this type of aggressive measures to pursue doping”. It surprises and surprises you. “I find it surprising that they can adopt such invasive measures of personal privacy. It’s one thing for an athlete to want to allege and prove something in their defense and provide their call log or WhatsApp, duly reviewed, so that it is known that there is no manipulation, and we recently exonerated an athlete for demonstrating contradiction with what was declared in the control form”, he explains. “But adopting these measures in a coercive manner and without judicial authorization seems disproportionate and incompatible with the fundamental right to the inviolability of communications, to personal privacy, to the presumption of innocence and not to declare guilt. As everyone probably knows, a witness is obliged to tell the truth, but an investigator 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 necessary to proceed with dumping and judicial control of its suitability in each case. 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 comply with what they prescribe, they can separate you or create problems for you”, he concludes.