By Duncan Mackay
January 21 - Juventus have appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against two-month bans handed out to two club doctors after they allegedly gave a banned substance to Fabio Cannavaro (pictured), Italy’s captain, a case which has put the club’s past record on distributing performance-enhancing drugs under the spotlight.
The centre-back escaped punishment for taking cortisone, which he claimed was administered to him by Bartolomeo Goitre and Luca Stefanini to treat a wasp sting, but the Serie A club’s doctors have instead been sanctioned by Italy’s national anti-doping body.
“We take into account the sanctions handed out by the national anti-doping body but remain firm in our conviction that the doctors Goitre and Stefanini offered the maximum collaboration with the relevant sporting institutions,” said a brief club statement.
Juventus applied for a doping exemption but failed to include all the necessary documents and Cannavaro subsequently failed a dope test following a match against AS Roma in August 2009.
The former World Player of the Year was exonerated of any blame in November but it again raises suspicions about the methods used at Juventus, Italy’s most successful club and who have been crowned European champions twice and lifted the Serie A title on 27 occasions.
In 2004 an Italian court found Juventus’ former team doctor Dr. Riccardo Agricola guilty of “sporting fraud” after they found he had been injecting players with substances including Erythropoietin (EPO), the synthetic hormone used to increase oxygen-carrying red blood cells.
Agricola was fined €2,000 (£1,742) and sentenced to one year and 10 months’ imprisonment.
Judge Guiseppe Casalbore heard one witness for the prosecution, a university pharmacology professor named Gianmartino Benzi, describe the 281 different drugs at the club’s training headquarters as “stocks that resembled the quantity you would find in a small hospital.”
Among the players who gave evidence during the high-profile trial in Turin were Roberto Baggio, Zinédine Zidane and Gianluca Vialli.
The case had been sparked by Czech-born coach Zdenek Zeman, who alleged that unnaturally rapid muscular development of Vialli and his fellow forward Alessandro Del Piero had been aided by banned performance-enhancing drugs.
All the players involved in the case denied taking drugs and none ever failed a test or were banned as a result of the trial.
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