File this one under "Convoluted, and definitely written by his lawyers". Ivan Basso, Italian cycling star and the heir apparent to Lance Armstrong on the Discovery Cycling Team, was caught red-handed last year in the Operacion Puerto doping affair just before the Tour de France (he was kicked out of the Tour), and Monday he finally admitted his guilt.
Or did he? In a nutshell, his statement says "I was the second-best cyclist in the world behind Lance in 2005. After he retired, I beat all my rivals in the May 2006 Giro d'Italia by over 9 minutes without doping, but at that point (and never before) I decided to attempt to dope to win the July 2006 Tour de France."
Does this strain the limits of credulity? Not sure if he thinks the public is so dumb as to believe this excuse (that the best cyclist in the world simply woke up one day and decided to dope) or he really was the dumbest cyclist in the peloton and deserved to get caught.
Either way, the evidence against him is damning, truly damning, including phone calls, payments and blood doping schedules going back to 2004. For example:
1. The code name 'Birillo' that appeared on the June 27, 2006, Guardia Civil dossier. This document was a product of the investigation known as Operación Puerto (started May 23, 2006, in Madrid) and in it Birillo was linked with the number '2.' Basso had historically denied Birillo as being the name of his dog, he insisted in his original CONI summons that his dog's name was 'Tarello'.
2. Two telephone recordings from May 13 and 14 made by DS Ignacio Labarta to Fuentes. "Birillo had arrived with Simoni at sixteen seconds,"was said on May 13 according to La Gazzetta dello Sport. This referred to Giro d'Italia stage seven, won by Rik Verbrugghe, where Basso finished 16 seconds back with Gilberto Simoni, Davide Rebellin and Serguei Gonchar. The next day another recording, "A certain Ivan Basso won." Basso was now first overall with José Enrique Gutierrez (Phonak) second. "Friend, you have... a first and a second."
3. A fax, outlined in page 15 of the dossier, that was sent from Fuentes to Nelson Giraldo Flores (in Colombia) in the days leading up to the "festival Mayo" (or Giro d'Italia). Fuentes wrote, "As per our agreement, I am sending a list of collaborators and participants in the festival that takes place in May;" going on to ask Colombian Flores for "help and collaboration." It listed riders Basso, Marco Serrano, Michele Scarponi, Gutierrez and Jan Ullrich (spelled with one "l" in the fax) without the use of code names.
4. An agenda with a schedule of blood extractions and transfusions since 2004. In the agenda the pseudonyms 'Birillo' and '2' are used.
5. Payments in 2004 of around €35,000 and another €6000 for the freezing the blood (or "gastos de Siberia"), and an advance payment of €70,000 in 2006 'to be defined individually'; there was also a message received from Fuentes in Italian which talks of a Zurich bank account.
6. Guardia Civil intercepted messages from Basso to Fuentes after the 2006 Giro.
7. The analyses of blood, which could have been done in November 2005 in Madrid, with haematologist Merino Batres, a collaborator of Fuentes. The Spanish Guardia Civil suspect that the cyclist visited Madrid at least three times but he had always denied being there.
