Burning questions: Justice by Twitter?

So Alberto Contador is free to race.

Twenty days after suspending the reigning Tour de France winner for one year, the Spanish federation last night overturned the ban.

Barring unforeseen developments, Contador will be at the start line for the Tour of the Algarve in Portugal on Wednesday (European time).

The reasons behind the Spanish federation's decision remain unclear. However, it seems likely they believed Contador's explanation that the clenbuterol arrived in his system via tainted beef.

To recap, Contador was caught in a test conducted on the second rest day during last year's Tour de France.

The amount of clenbuterol detected was microscopic. It was far too small to have assisted the rider and 40 times tinier than the amount the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) requires its labs to detect. But that was irrelevant to WADA. This is because clenbuterol is an artificial substance, used by athletes to strip fat and gain muscle mass. It is not found naturally in the human body.

Contador argued that he had eaten a bad steak. In a sport where US Olympic gold medallist Tyler Hamilton once claimed that foreign blood found in his system came from a 'vanishing twin', this was far from the worst of excuses. But like the steak itself, it was difficult to swallow.

Clenbuterol has in the past been used in beef production. However, in the European Union, clenbuterol has been banned for use in cattle since 1996. Eventually, Contador said the steak was bought in Spain. This did not please Spanish beef producers, and the producers had the European Union on their side. EU figures found clenbuterol in only one of 83,203 samples in EU countries in 2008 and 2009. Out of 19,431 samples analysed in Spain, zero came back positive.

There was another, perhaps statistically more plausible theory. This suggested that the traces of clenbuterol found in Contador were a residue of an earlier dose, which the three-time Tour winner then pumped back into his body via an illicit blood transfusion.

Squirrels in charge of the nuthouse

In sport, integrity is everything. One of the problems for cycling is that, while doping samples are analysed by WADA, sanctions are determined by each rider's national federation.

This leaves the process open to suggestions of a specific type of corruption, the time-honoured term for which is 'leaving the squirrels in charge of the nuthouse'.

In this particular case, Spain's national federation stands accused of having backflipped on their Contador ruling because of political pressure.

Last Thursday night, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero posted on Twitter that "there are no legal grounds for sanctioning Contador".

Newspapers including Madrid's El Pais have reported that key figures at the federation were influenced by the tweet.

If these reports were to prove true, Contador's acquittal would at least provide sport with an excitingly twenty-first century innovation. Athletes, after all, are nothing if not modern-day gladiators, and being reprieved by Prime Ministerial tweet would be like replacing the Roman emperor's upturned thumb with a crisp 140 characters.

For cycling, unfortunately, the end result would be nothing new.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of BigPond Sport.