After an eight hour hearing yesterday with the International Court of Sport (CAS) it has been concluded that Stefan Schumacher’s fate will not be decided until mid-December.
Schumacher went to the CAS to appeal the UCI ruling which imposed a two-year suspension on the German.
Michael Lehner, Schumacher’s lawyer, was however quite optimistic, “I am cautiously optimistic – all of our arguments were hear” he told the dpa from Lausanne, Switzerland.
Lehner’s main argument did not relate to whether or not Schumacher doped at the Tour but focused on the “unauthorized analysis” emphasizing several errors in the testing procedures,
“If the rules are not met, then he has not doped in the legal sense,” claimed Lehner.
The former Gerolsteiner rider tested positive twice, once during the 2008 Tour de France, and again during the Olympic games in Beijing. If the CAS does not overturn the UCI decision, than the German is banned from competition for two years, his suspension would then end on January 21st 2011.