Basso Admits To "Attempted" Blood Doping

The big news over the last couple of weeks concerning the Operacíon Puerto scandal was that after the spaniards realized they could not charge any of the implicated riders under their laws, they had to close the investigation. This action allowed jurisdiction to pass to other athletic bodies, such as the Swiss Cycling Union investigating Jan Ullrich and asking for DNA samples, or the Italian Olympic Committee investigating other Italian riders, such as Ivan Basso. Italy's laws concerning doping are much stricter than Spain's, after the Festina scandal marred the 1998 Tour de France. Possibly acknowledging the more dire sentencing, Ivan Basso decided to confess to the Olympic Committee his involvement with the spanish doctor Fuentes. That bombshell admission was mitigated by more statements today, that he only attempted the blood doping for the Tour de France, but his 2006 Giro d'Italia was clean.

I am not sure if Fuentes' methods for blood doping would have been caught by the hematocrit level test currently employed, which caught Tyler Hamilton and Roberto Heras, so I'm not yet going to believe Basso's claims of innocence for last year's Giro. It seems the ethics rules for suspending riders under investigation for doping worked at last year's Tour de France, not allowing a cheater like Basso to compete. I only wish he admitted guilt at the time, instead of waiting until the Spanish authorities gave up their investigation. I also wish the Spanish authorities had let go of their jurisdiction last summer when they already knew their laws did not apply to the riders on Fuentes' contact list. Perhaps Basso, once his two year ban is over, can redeem himself, as David Millar is beginning to, but Basso has much further to fall, because he was an esteemed Lance Armstrong rival and he had the reputation as one of cycling's "nice guys." We will see.