Heras wins back Vuelta victory

Seven years on, Roberto Heras is once again the only cyclist to have won the Vuelta a España four times.

The Supreme Court on Friday decided to lift the doping ban that led him to be stripped of his 2005 Vuelta title.

The director of the Vuelta, Javier Guillén, has recognized the decision and said that although there had been a ceremony to hand the trophy to the second-place rider that year, Russian Denis Menchov, the title had been left vacant. It was now up to the International Cycling Union to reinstate Heras as the 2005 winner, Guillén said. The prize money will soon be transferred over to the Spanish cyclist, who was then competing with the Liberty team — he won his previous Vueltas with Kelme and Discovery.

The anti-doping laboratory in Madrid had detected traces of synthetic EPO in Heras’s urine a few weeks after he achieved his fourth Vuelta victory in September 2005. The long and drawn-out disciplinary proceedings ended with him receiving a two-year ban and the Spanish Cycling Federation annulling his results.

Heras appealed to the Spanish Sporting Discipline Committee (CEDD), which he believed to be the higher body. But it declared itself not competent to deal with the case and told him to appeal to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport. Instead, Heras, believing he had been deprived of a right, took his case to the Spanish civil courts. After several partial victories, the path has now led to absolute triumph in the Supreme Court.

In his reasoning, magistrate Segundo Menéndez Pérez underlined the ill-defined national and international borders at the time of the ban. As the sanction had been imposed by a national federation, the Supreme Court understood that the process should have finished up at the CEDD, which had not admitted Heras’ case. That is why its sentence annuls all measures taken against him.

Heras was 31 when he won the tour in 2005 and was unable to find a new team after completing his two-year ban. In the meantime, the Operation Puerto anti-doping case exploded in 2006, which resulted in the disappearance of Liberty and in which Heras was also implicated.