The connections between Spain and Andorra in sport, so varied and frequent – Piqué buying the local football club, athletes of all kinds establishing their residence in the Principality – lead to a doping case for the first time. The matter affects mountain runners, two Andorran ultra-distance runners who, according to the investigation by the Civil Guard and the Spanish Anti-Doping Agency (AEPSAD), are involved in the purchase and sale of EPO and other substances through the internet within the framework of the hypoxianet operation. They are the Teixidó brothers, Ferrán and Xavier, two local sports legends in Andorra. It happened in the UCO operation that resulted in the seizure of 850 EPO injectables and the arrest of the two leaders of the organization, a nurse from a public hospital in Cádiz and a Serbian criminal. The topic still hangs after two years.
Due to the landing of hundreds of athletes in the small country of 77,000 inhabitants, the World Anti-Doping Agency (AMA) promoted the creation of the Andorran Anti-Doping Agency (AGAD), which was founded in 2016 and boasts its principles on its website. “The AGAD aims to protect the right of athletes to participate in sports activities without doping, promote health and ensure fairness and equality for all in the field of sport.”
In the Hipoxianet operation, the UCO arrested a nurse from a public hospital in Cádiz who was distributing EPO using his advantageous position as a civil servant. The exit procedure from the legal tender EPO was simple. The nurse placed an order for twice what was necessary at the hospital’s expense. If he needed 20 vials of EPO, the aforementioned professional requested 40. Twenty for the center and twenty for distribution in the doping network that marketed the prohibited substance through pages created on the Internet: ‘epototal.eu’; ‘epobest.com’; ‘steroidsfr.com’; ‘esteroids.com’; or ‘steroidhr.com’.
All domains were hosted on servers in countries like Iceland or tax havens like New Jersey, whose legislation is more permissive in terms of web hosting.
The Civil Guard identified 250 athletes as buyers of EPO in this network. None of them are top level, many were related to mountain races, popular athletics events and cycling veterans championships. Two of the most famous athletes were the ‘trail runners’ Teixidó. For the Andorran brothers, the Spanish anti-doping agency sent the required documentation of the case to its Andorran counterpart. Time has passed and in the AGAD there is no resolution of the file, although there is a proposal for a sanction for the long-distance brothers.
“We are following the usual protocol in these cases,” the director of the Andorran agency, Natalia Font, informs ABC. An alleged violation of anti-doping regulations has been committed and athletes have the option of resorting to an independent commission, which must decide whether to apply the sanction that we have proposed (four years is the norm in a case like this), whether to reduce or does not apply.
It happens that the ramifications of the theme extend. The two brothers are public officials of the Andorran principality. Xavier works in the fire department and Ferrán is a forest ranger. Two public servants accused of doping and drug trafficking in an operation in Spain.
“This is our first case of doping as an agency that applies the updates of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA),” says Natalia Font, who explains that two people work in the organization and fifteen agents who carry out anti-doping controls collaborate. “Perhaps for that reason we are taking longer than is usual in Spain. But we have nothing to hide, there is no secret. We are on the line to collaborate with all the agencies and federations that ask us to do so.”
Font assures that the Teixidó brothers have retired from the practice of sport. Ferrán had professional success as a mountain runner due to his successes in the World Cup, in the specialty of the vertical kilometer. He achieved three podiums in the general classification of the vertical kilometer World Cup and five podiums in 10 tests of this same competition in 2018. Both brothers shared the victory in 2019 in the Valls de Canillo Mountain Marathon (42km).
