Life "appeared to be going on much as normal outside Barcelona’s Biomedical Research Park last week," according to Tom Cary of the London TELGRAPH. Doctors in white lab coats "emerged periodically to puff on cigarettes." Joggers "ran up and down the beachfront promenade across the road, enjoying the early January sun." Somewhere "deep in the recesses of the enormous, wood-encased facility, though, in a freezer in the anti-doping lab of the Institut Hospital del Mar d’Investigacions Mèdique, the clock was ticking on what some believe may be one of the biggest suppressed doping scandals of all time." In the coming days Madrid's Provincial Court is to release its verdict on the appeals lodged by, among others, the World Anti-Doping Association and the Int'l Cycling Union "against the destruction of the almost 200 blood bags which have been stored here as part of the Operación Puerto anti-doping probe." To "say that the verdict is eagerly anticipated is perhaps over-egging it." Puerto "has been going on so long that many people have forgotten all about it." It has been almost 10 years "since a series of police raids uncovered, among other paraphernalia, hundreds of bags of blood and plasma" in the offices of former cycling doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, and almost three years since Judge Julia Patricia Santamaria "issued her order to destroy them." But the potential of Puerto to "blow up into something far bigger, pulling other sports and athletes and administrators into its web, still remains." One man "has dedicated most of the past decade of his life trying to ensure that happens." For the past two years, Gomez Bastida has been director of AEPSAD, Spain's anti-doping agency, "in which capacity he is now waiting like the rest of us for the court's decision." If the appeals are rejected -- theoretically anyway -- "that would be the end of it." To date, "only cycling has truly been nobbled: 56 riders were implicated in total, although only six served any kind of ban." But Fuentes "has frequently boasted of" working with athletes from other sports, including football, tennis, athletics and boxing (TELEGRAPH, 1/10).
