SINCE the start of the Tour de France Riccardo Ricco has been depicted – accurately, as it turned out – as an accident waiting to happen, like a cartoon character who has run off a cliff but whose legs keep moving, in the hope that terra firma will
miraculously reappear beneath them.
Yesterday, the full extent of the Italian's folly became clearer, and his fate became more bleak.
Having spent the night in a police cell in Pamiers, a small town near Lavelanet, where Ricco was arrested just minutes before Thursday's twelfth stage, he was formally charged at 3pm.
As reports came out that French authorities had discovered illegal products in Ricco's baggage, it emerged that his team-mate, the veteran Italian Leonardo Piepoli, had also been fired by his Spanish team, Saunier Duval, for an unspecified "violation of the team's ethics code." The team's director, Mauro Gianetti, had earlier revealed that Ricco had assured him, "on his mother's head," at the start of the year that he was doing nothing illegal.
Ricco follows Moises Duenas, the Barloworld rider whose positive test for EPO was announced 24 hours before the Italian's, in facing a custodial sentence.
Duenas appeared before a French court in Tarbes on Thursday, where he was charged with the "use and possession of plants and poisonous substances." The prosecutor, Gerard Aldige, described the stash of products recovered from the Spaniard's hotel room as a "small pharmacy," containing "syringes, needles and blood bags (and] a multitude of other products, in liquid and sachet form."
Ricco and Duenas could be looking at two years in prison for use of a poisonous substance, with Duenas facing a further three years for illegally importing banned products.
The first of the three riders to test positive in this year's Tour, Manuel Beltran, escaped lightly by comparison, when a search of his hotel room uncovered nothing. After being questioned by police following his positive test for EPO, 37-year old Beltran exited the Tour from Toulouse airport, bound for his family's olive farm in Spain last Saturday.
What links all three doping cases – four if you include Piepoli, though he has not tested positive – is Spain. Beltran and Duenas are Spanish; Piepoli and Ricco ride for a Spanish team.
It was Spain, too, where Operacion Puerto, the blood doping investigation that came to public attention in 2006, was centred. It concerned a blood doping ring based in Madrid, with bags of blood recovered from a flat, reportedly belonging to around 200 athletes. The doctor at the centre of the ring, Eufemiano Fuentes, was linked to footballers, tennis players and athletes (his wife is Cristina Perez, the Spanish 400 metres hurdles record holder), as well as around fifty cyclists.
Previously, he had been chief club doctor at Las Palmas, but he left his position when syringes containing EPO were discovered in the team's dressing room.
Though Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich were high profile casualties of Operacion Puerto, rumours have continued about other top riders, some of them riding this year's Tour. Indeed, most agree that unless it is re-opened, Operacion Puerto will continue to be a malignant shadow, stalking the sport.
David Millar, who lives in Girona, and last year rode for Saunier Duval, has described Spain as "the wild west" as far as doping is concerned. Pat McQuaid, the International Cycling Union (UCI) president, has also suggested that the doping culture remains most deeply ingrained in Spain.
Speaking to me at the UCI's headquarters in November, McQuaid said that many professional cyclists still "live in their own little world, surrounded by a small number of people belonging to the old guard; and they can be very influenced by those within that cocoon.
"That's why they can rationalise doping so easily." Such "cocoons," added McQuaid, seem to have been largely eliminated from the French and German teams, but they remain in certain Spanish teams, and, perhaps, one or two Italian teams.
Millar said at yesterday's start in Narbonne that the efforts should be stepped up to find the shadowy figures behind the doping. "Maybe there is someone behind Ricco who has told him he won't go positive. We need to find out who is behind this, where he's getting his stuff from, and who has told him he can get through controls.
"They have this culture embedded in them and they honestly believe it is not possible to do these things without (doping]. It's sad. You see that Christian (Vande Velde, Millar's Garmin team-mate] is third overall, and he is doing it without any injections, without anything. If you can't do it like that then you are not good enough – it's as simple as that."
The full article contains 804 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
