"My hope is called Amen"

In the maternity ward at the Gregorio Marañón hospital in Madrid, two friends of Alemayehu Bezabeh contemplate Amen with doting eyes. Bezabeh, smiling for the first time in a couple of months, also looks lovingly at his daughter: "My hope is called Amen," says the Ethiopia-born athlete. "This girl will give me a lot of strength." Amen, an Ethiopian name chosen because it easy to pronounce for Spaniards, was born last Saturday morning.

So relates Miguel Ángel Mostaza, Bezabeh's coach and confidant, one of the few people the athlete trusts in Spain. Bezabeh doesn't want to know about the press, nor the Blume high-performance center from where he was expelled. Bezabeh's life changed when Operation Greyhound investigators found him about to undergo a blood transfusion. A Spanish citizen since 2008, Bezabeh won the European Cross Country Championships in Dublin, the first Spaniard to do so, and last June he broke the national 5,000m record. When Bezabeh was arrested, he confessed immediately to the Spanish Athletics Federation and received a provisional ban.

"He was very upset at first because he didn't know what was happening. He trained a little, went running in the street, but stopped. When he arrived in Spain he fell in with [Manuel] Pascua, an old-school coach who said that as everybody doped, his athletes, to compete, should dope as well. He did what he was told," says José Antonio Bodoque, Bezabeh's physio. "It makes me sad to him engulfed in a scandal when he is so good. He is a great talent and doesn't need to dope to win races. But in life you have to be consistent with your actions and he can't race for now. But he'll be back and he'll keep winning because he's in a class of his own." But Bezabeh is waiting for his daughter to become strong enough to return to Ethiopia. "If I can't compete here, I can't live here. I'll go back to Ethiopia to look after my wife and child," says Bezabeh.

"Bezabeh hopes it will be resolved soon and that he will not get a two-year ban, because he did not take any illegal substances," says Mostaza. "He has been honest and I hope they treat him well."