(photo credit: VeloNews)

Alejandro Valverde (pictured above) took his second Dauphine win in as many years across the Atlantic this afternoon, and thus, the sport of cycling took another body blow in the department of respectability.

It’s been an up-and-down year for Valverde, who in May was banned for two years from competition in Italy, effectively ruling him out of this year’s Tour de France.

Essentially, the Italian National Olympic Committee said it had linked blood taken from Valverde on a rest day in Italy during last year’s Tour with some recovered from the Operacion Puerto scandal, now entering it’s fourth year of relevancy.

CONI officials recommended at that time that Valverde be suspended for two years, a recommendation that has since been taken up. The Madrid High Court rebutted this decision, claiming legal invalidity for several reasons, including:

• CONI had no jurisdiction in the matter, as it was a judicial body of another country.
• CONI officials had no right to any of the evidence from Operacion Puerto, because they were a judicial body of another government, not one that took evidence from the Puerto bust in 2006.

Valverde also argued against CONI’s jurisdiction in the matter, for all the good it did him.

As the perhaps melodramatic title of this post suggests, the problem here isn’t Valverde’s guilt or innocence, CONI’s jurisdiction or Operacion Puerto itself or the sheer fact that a rider banned from competition in one of cycling’s top three countries (so to speak) can win one of the great, legendary races of another of those countries during the ban.

It’s all of it.

As an institution bent on cleansing itself of illegal performance enhancement — and one that is arguably doing more than any other mainstream sport in the world — cycling is still failing.

Not for trying, however; cycling is tripping over its own feet.

I don’t know if Alejandro Valverde doped.

The legal ramifications of whether CONI has the jurisdiction to compare blood, obtained in Italy, of a Spanish rider to evidence seized by Spanish authorities in Spain is quite beyond me.

My severely limited knowledge of the testing procedures used to compare each of these separate samples allows me only to trust that such methods are accurate and above-board — an assumption that apparently cannot be made in good conscience, given accuracy concerns about some of said procedures.

What I can say, however, with 100 percent certainty, is that cycling will never be able to effectively clean itself up unless it can force together some kind of governing body to which all teams and riders must answer, all sponsors, promoters, directors and officials must cooperate with and through which all anti-doping efforts must be monitored.

There is simply too much room for speculation and error, too many loopholes to slip through, too little reliability being banged through the sport to make a true difference.

Yes, it’s all well and good to suspend riders who are unequivocally proven to have doped.

But the Valverde case proves clearly that precious few doping cases are even close to that cut-and-dry. That means it’s easier for the guilty to escape justice — or at least cast serious doubt on their guilt — and vice-versa for the innocent.

If the system were broken, then it could be fixed. But there is no system, begetting the chaos exemplified by the whole Valverde affair.

Instead, there is a loose confederation of committees, agencies, courts, labs, teams, investigators and God knows what else trying to hold together cycling’s credibility with a blood bag and a box of rubber bands.

In the Agatha Christie mystery novel “Murder on the Orient Express,” detective Hercule Poirot discovers that a man found murdered on a train was not, in fact, killed by another passenger on the train, but all of them, working in congruence.

Unknowingly, the same can be said of those who exercise any sort of control over the world of cycling.

Something has to change. But it probably never will.