The head of Spain’s Olympic committee stepped up to defend Spanish sport on Wednesday in the wake of two-time Tour de France champion cyclist Alberto Contador’s two-year ban for doping.
Committee president Alejandro Blanco defended his country’s sport against its detractors, including a French satirical television show that lampooned Spain’s sporting heros in a sketch about doping.
“The successes of Spanish sport are solely due to hard work, dedication and planning,” Blanco told a news conference.
“We are the biggest defenders of cleanliness in sport and we can hold our head high,” he said, citing Spain’s 2006 anti-doping law.
“We have a large number of tests per year: more than 11,000 in 2011. All this means Spain is in the frontline of those countries fighting against doping,” he added.
There have been 54 police operations against alleged doping networks in Spain over the past five years, Blanco added.
“In neighbouring countries, there have been two to four investigations per year,” he said.
“There have been more operations in Spain in recent years to stop and destroy doping networks than in any other country.
“No country in the world can say it does more than us to fight doping. They do the same as us,” he added.
The Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport on Monday handed a two-year ban to Contador after he tested positive for the banned substance clenbuterol.
Contador says it was due to a contaminated steak eaten during the 2010 Tour de France. He said on Tuesday that his lawyers were looking into a possible appeal.
“We will continue to fight until the end,” he told a news conference.
The ban prompted widespread indignation in Spain, with many in the public and media branding it unjust.
Contador’s fans said they will don masks of their hero on Sunday and hold a symbolic bike ride in his home town of Pinto to support him.
The sanction is backdated to August 2010, meaning Contador can return to competition on August 6 this year.
As well as ruling him out of this year’s Tour de France and the Olympic Games in London, he will be stripped of several wins, including his 2010 yellow jersey, one of his three victories in the French race.
Blanco hit out on Wednesday at the “Guignols de l’Info”, a French TV sketch show.
Spain’s tennis federation said on Wednesday it would sue French broadcaster Canal+ over the comedy sketches which implied Contador, tennis player Rafael Nadal and other Spanish athletes use performance-enhancing drugs.
The sketch featured a puppet likeness of world No.2 Nadal filling the gas tank of his car from his own bladder.
“I did not like it at all. These are very harsh images which do not correspond at all to reality,” Blanco said.
