2024-01-28 22:16:40
“José Luis, you must resign for the good of Spanish sport.” On January 5, after the World Anti-Doping Agency launched a harsh statement against Spain, the chief of staff of José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, president of the Higher Sports Council (CSD), finished opening the exit door for José Luis Terreros. But this doctor, who since 2017 has been in charge of the State Agency Spanish Commission for the Fight against Doping in Sports (CELAD), decided to resist.
Anti-doping has hidden the positive result of a national team sprinter since 2019
At first it was sunk, but it recovered and launched itself against the Government, which had it in its power to push it off the cliff. In the end, he was dismissed on Friday. Thus concluded almost seven years of management marked by erratic internal processing: some files of athletes who did not see the light and others continued forward. This is the story of how an internal complaint blew up the Spanish anti-doping system.
In 2017, the Government of Mariano Rajoy changed a civil guard for a doctor in charge of anti-doping. Terreros, a civil servant, recognized in the sports medicine sector since the 90s, adopted an optimistic approach. “We are getting closer to victory. Doping is an enemy that can be defeated,” he declared, upon taking office.
But almost at that moment a problem began to arise that ended up overwhelming him. To him and almost to the whole of Spanish sport. The decree that regulated the taking of samples for athletes, and which was in force until just over a year ago, established that there should be two control agents when taking samples from athletes. Well, that’s how it was always interpreted. But the wording was confusing. That decree, from 2009, established that during “the collection of samples from an athlete […] only the following people may be present” and there it listed “at least a second Doping Control Agent”. “May” and “at least” are apparently contradictory terms, but previous anti-doping officials point out that it was always interpreted that there had to be two for the control to be valid. For international competitions it was enough to have only one agent, but in Spain there had to be two.
In practice, according to sources in the sector, only one agent went to many controls (this saved costs for the German company PWC, which won the vast majority of contracts and which had a fluid relationship with CELAD). And that left the infractions in a strange situation that Terreros resolved erratically.
On June 17, 2017, for example, a single agent took a sample from an amateur athlete who tested positive for a diuretic. After several twists and turns, including a sanction, the file ended up being archived when she alleged that the control form had been altered. Although there was only one agent, and aware that this invalidated it, they noted that there were two, according to their defense. It all ended in a court in Madrid. The court case affects a non-relevant athlete, but gives indications that Anti-Doping knew that a single agent was a problem.
When the instructor wrote to Terreros to file the case because the athlete alleged that there was only one agent, he responded: “Seeing the allegations, which indicate certain defects in the control process that we had not considered, and that appear to have existed, for course and if it seems appropriate, you can file the case to consider those allegations.” That email is from March 6, 2019. [La Audiencia ha ordenado juzgar al número dos de Terreros para dilucidar si manipuló un documento público, como adelantó ABC].
The dates are important because it is before other positives with different results. In late 2018, a weightlifter tested positive but claimed there was only one agent. It was a recurring problem. She was punished.
A few months later, in July 2019, sprinter Patrick Chinedu Ike tested positive for nandrolone. Although he had already left his best years behind, he had become international. But for years he did not receive any files. Contrary to what happened on previous occasions, Anti-Doping estimated that since there was only one control agent, it would not be able to sanction him and the case was shelved. It was added to five positives by biological passport that had also not been processed due to a ruling that ruled in favor of the cyclist Ibai Salas. In that case, the State’s own lawyers appealed to, on behalf of the Sports Administrative Court, overturn the sanction.
Many of these things may not have been known if a CELAD worker had not gone to the Ministry of Education with an internal complaint under a law that protects whistleblowers of corruption. There she detailed that Chinedu’s positive test was never processed. At the CELAD leadership they attribute everything to a series of personal quarrels. For practical purposes it is irrelevant. The internal war had broken out.
The Ministry of Education, which assumed responsibility for Sports in November, took the complaint seriously and ended up sending it to the prosecutor’s office. The complaint not only talked about that case in the drawer, but also that CELAD had paid for controls with a single agent knowing that they would not end up serving to sanction.
At first Terreros did not take the scandal too seriously. When on December 26, elDiario.es revealed Chinedu’s hidden positive, he responded to the CSD with a brief email that did not give many explanations. He would then claim that she was on vacation. When he gave interviews he justified that he left Chinedu’s positive result in limbo because CELAD had a dispute with another athlete who had to determine whether it was legal to sanction one agent or two. It wasn’t like that. That dispute was not opened until early 2020, five months after Chinedu’s positive test. And he was sentenced in December 2021, pointing out that there should be two agents (as the sector mostly understood). From the first internal signs that there were problems if there was only one agent in control until the sentence, four years of files had passed.
The problem is that the internal complaint put on the table two apparently incompatible practices: paying with public money for controls with a single agent and, at the same time, burying positives when those controls detected them. A system in which CELAD apparently tripped itself up in the fight against doping.
In his defense, Terreros issued a statement outside the CSD. “We can affirm that the payment of controls by the successive Directors of the AEPSAD until 2021 in which a single Control Agent was present, did not constitute any irregularity, since said controls complied with the national and international standards in force in those moments.”
But, at the same time, he defended not sanctioning Chinedu and another athlete hunted with a single agent. “The suspension has originated from a legal necessity so as not to undermine the rights of athletes.” In the AS newspaperfor example, stressed that idea: “If we had sanctioned him [a Chinedu]we could have been accused of prevarication for issuing a resolution knowing that it could be unjust. […] If we opened it, it would still have gone unnoticed due to an anomaly in the sampling. The process is archived so that it could be sanctioned later.”
Terreros was in a mousetrap. If he defended the legality of single-agent testing, he would be caught for burying some of those same tests when they came back positive. The complaint had that point against it. If he defended himself on one point, he condemned himself on the other. And vice versa. But he tried both things: justify that the controls with an agent were valid and defend that he did not process several positives obtained in this way.
The Provincial Court of Madrid and the prosecutor’s office have certified that it was a circle that was impossible to square. In the case of the weightlifter who was sanctioned by a single agent, they have agreed with the Administration and filed the case against CELAD. But he considers that “despite the irregularity or anomaly detected” as there were not two agents, “he had to propose the opening of the file given that the sampling that was not in accordance with the law was not decisive in the analytical result and, therefore, did not invalidate the result”. That is to say, the controls with a single agent are irregular but, at the same time, they had to open a file if there was a positive. Quite the opposite of the public defense of CELAD. Quite the opposite of what was happening.
The explanations did not convince his superiors and the Ministry of Education and the AMA sentenced Terreros. But the Government cannot dismiss him directly, but rather the Governing Council of CELAD, which was pending renewal, has to do so. In public and private, Terreros aimed high, he revealed that Uribes had not even wanted to meet with him, he alleged that the AMA had him in its sights for having monitored its president and promoted a resistance group with American countries and pointed out that dismissing fulminantly to the anti-doping director is what Russia would do. He withdrew his resignation announcement and waited until Friday, at the first CELAD meeting.
There, the Government representatives elected Silvia Calzón, a doctor like Terreros and who was Secretary of State for Health during the covid. Only the representative of the autonomous communities, appointed by the Popular Government of Aragon, the community from which Terreros comes, abstained. Calzón must recover the international credit of a country with a terrible past. The country in which Operation Puerto ended in a judicial fiasco, in which President Zapatero supported Contador when he tested positive, which had its anti-doping laboratory suspended… and which, in an Olympic year, became embroiled in an internal dispute that only I had one way out: start over.
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