Also on the third day of the hearing there was no verdict in the doping trial involving HSV professional Mario Vuskovic. The court wants and must advise further in the case, it said at the hearing in Frankfurt this Friday. “We need a reasonable amount of time to make a decision. This is the only way we can make an appropriate decision,” announced DFB judge Stephan Oberholz.
However, there will not be a fourth hearing in person. Today and in the following days, consultations will be withdrawn, a decision will be “sent to those affected in writing within the next 14 days,” said Oberholz. This means that Vuskovic’s lightning comeback is not yet possible for the time being, he will remain banned by the DFB until a verdict is reached.
HSV professional Vuskovic bursts into tears in court
At the hearing on Friday, Vuskovic once once more protested his innocence. “I’m innocent and my family and lawyers are working to prove it,” said the HSV professional. “I have never cheated in sport and I never will. I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy what I and my family have had to go through in the last few months.”
Then Vuskovic burst into tears in court. “Every day I hope that this nightmare will end,” he said. “Most of all, I fear that tomorrow it can hit another athlete. I wish that no one has to go through what I am experiencing now. I would like to thank my club, my fans, my family, the lawyers and everyone who has stood behind me.”
Vuskovic lawyer Dr. Rain sought acquittal in court
During the third negotiation on Friday, an attempt was also made to find a compromise solution. “We looked for ways to solve the process by consensus. Unfortunately, that failed,” said judge Oberholz. In such a case, the judgment might have been curtailed.
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Previously, Vuskovic’s lawyer Dr. Joachim Rain applied for an acquittal “because Mario Vuskovic did not dope,” as he emphasized in his closing speech: “There is no system that might be uncovered here. He didn’t buy an epo, use or take an epo. Like everyone else, I stopped making money on this case simply because I feel that there is a great deal of injustice going on here. Mario Vuskovic cannot be expected to do that.”
Even the prosecution in the person of Dr. Anton Nachreiner, chairman of the DFB control committee, considered Vuskovic guilty, but advised the court to “possibly reduce the sentence for a 21-year-old young man who once made a mistake”. Nachreiner emphasized that it was not his job to “ruin what was probably a very successful career. The ultimate goal must not be to destroy people and lead them to a premature end to their careers, but to get people back on the right path.”
Prof. Dr. Lorenz Hofbauer supported the HSV lawyers
The HSV lawyers were supported this time by Prof. Dr. Lorenz Hofbauer, Senior Physician at the University Hospital Dresden. He is one of the people who also prepared reports for HSV and described the urine sample as defective and therefore invalid. On Friday, too, he reiterated that the result of the A and B samples was an arbitrary evaluation. He illustrated in court how difficult such a positive finding is really to recognize. Almost everything is a matter of interpretation and cannot really be proven, said Hofbauer.
The HSV lawyers had criticized in particular that a C sample of the urine was not taken despite the court’s request. The independent Canadian expert Jean-François Naud refused to carry out a C sample because he considered the results of the A and B samples to be correct. The Vuskovic side accuses the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) of having called on Naud not to carry out any further analysis. However, there is no information regarding this, the court said on Friday.
Missing C-Probation for Vuskovic Lawyers Obstruction of Evidence
Vuskovic’s lawyers called the lack of a C-sample an obstruction of evidence and requested that it be carried out in a non-WADA laboratory. However, WADA fundamentally disagreed with a further analysis – from their point of view the positive result of Sven Voss from Kreischa was valid and corresponded to international standards. The confirmation of a B sample in another laboratory is therefore only possible for exceptional reasons, which do not exist in this case. Oberholz says of these events: “The extent to which the fact that no further analysis was carried out will affect the procedure is a question that the sports court will have to answer at some point.”
The fact that there was a third day of the hearing at all and that the verdict was not – as originally planned – already following two hearings was due to these very doubts regarding Vuskovic’s urine sample. The further hearing last Friday was then postponed once more by a week because Vuskovic’s lawyer “submitted a new, extensive defense brief, which also contains four new, additional assessments by scientific consultants as an annex. The necessary and proper discussion of this would no longer have been possible by the original date this Friday,” said the sports court chairman Oberholz at the time.
