Paolo Guerrero’s household will be a happy one this Christmas – or at least a happier one than seemed likely a few days ago.
Peru’s captain and centre-forward failed a drug test in October, and the following month he was banned from football for a year. On appeal FIFA have halved the ban. It now ends in early May, meaning Guerrero will be available for the event that promises to be the high point of his long career – Peru’s first World Cup since 1982.
The ban has been halved, and so the glass is half full. But it remains half empty. He is still guilty, and still faces some time on the sidelines. He and his lawyers continue to believe that this is unfair, and they are contemplating taking the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. This, as we will see, is a risky strategy. But their position is understandable.
If Guerrero is short of cash, he might consider suing some of the news organisations who affirmed that he has tested positive for cocaine use. This is not the case. Guerrero subjected himself to an examination of his hair in order to prove it.
He tested positive for benzoylecgonine. This, most specialists agree, is a substance which offers no significant advantage to a sportsman. It is on the list of banned substances because it is a metabolite of cocaine, and therefore can act as an indicator of cocaine consumption. This, it has been established, was not the case for Guerrero. His test detected very low levels of the banned substance – for which the most likely explanation would appear to be of contamination; suffering from a cold, Guerrero drank herbal tea boiled in a kettle or from a mug that may have earlier been used for coca tea, a common drink in the Andes derived from leaf of the coca plant.
It is surely absurd that Guerrero was at risk of missing out on the biggest event of his long and blameless career for a non-offence of no sporting consequence.
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But at least his case has been handled with more sensitivity than that of a young Ecuadorian striker, Jose Angulo. Last year little Independiente del Valle, from the outskirts of Quito, caused shock after shock when they made it all the way to the final of the Copa Libertadores, South America’s Champions League. Quick and powerful, Angulo was their cutting edge. But he failed a drug test at the final, won by Atletico Nacional of Colombia. Angulo tested positive for cocaine.
Conmebol, South America’s UEFA equivalent, banned him for a year. That cost him a move to Granada in Spain, who ripped up the contract he had signed. Even so, FIFA appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, wanting a harsher sentence, and last week the verdict came through. Angulo has been suspended for four years.
His circumstances are different from those of Guerrero. But it would seem clear enough that he was neither seeking nor gaining a sporting advantage from his use of cocaine, whose short kick of euphoria affects the brain rather than the muscles. But the regulations treat him just as if he were Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong, athletes who set out to defraud their respective sports.
Surely this is wrong. Recreational drugs are banned on moral grounds – it could be justified by the argument that the athlete needs to be protected from the temptation of taking substances which will harm his sporting performance. Jose Angulo, though, has not been protected. A moment of indiscipline, harming no one but himself, committed at the age of 21 has cost him a huge chunk of his career, and robbed him of momentum he will probably never recover. Who really gains from this?
And there is food for thought here for Guerrero and his lawyers. The Court of Arbitration for Sport reserve the right to increase a punishment they consider too lenient. It is highly likely they will stick to the position that some ban is required – thus upholding the principle that under any normal circumstances an athlete is responsible for what goes into his body.
If so, then a six-month ban and the chance of playing at the World Cup could be the best that Guerrero can hope for. The current state of affairs might be as good as it gets for Peru’s talismanic captain.
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