VeloNews carries the story that Santiago Botero has been cleared of wrongdoing by the Colombian authorities regarding his supposed implication in Operacion Puerto. The question is, what should we get out of this?
The possibilities, simply stated, are:
- The guy is simply innocent and was wrongly accused. Maybe the sting was a bit overzealously done.
- The guy is still guilty, but the people in charge of punishment -- the rider's national licensing authority -- are incapable of taking action. I'm not suggesting the Colombian authority is corrupt, but I have no idea what sort of procedures they adhere to, what standards of proof, what sort of political pressures, etc.
- The dossiers themselves are simply not that helpful, and ultimately we have no idea whether this guy is a doper. In this case (which I suspect is the most likely), we're left with nothing more than the usual suspicions, which lead us more in the direction of guilty-til-proven-innocent these days.