Eufemiano Fuentes (born 1955) is aSpanish sportsdoctor who was implicated in theOperación Puerto doping case.
Fuentes was once an athlete. He then became theteam doctor ofTeam ONCE, Amaya andKelme. The former Kelme riderJesús Manzano accused Fuentes of being involved with doping.
Team doctor of the Kelme team in 2005. At that time he had been the doctor of the Kelme team for 16 months. He announced that he was retiring from involvement with professional cycling, citing health and family reasons as well as a desire to investigate retinoblastoma cancer in the Instituto del Cáncer de Canarias.[1]
Fuentes was arrested by theGuardia Civil on May 22, 2006, together with four others: the manager of the Liberty Seguros teamManolo Saiz, José Luis Merino ahaematologist at an analytical laboratory in Madrid, Alberto León, a professional mountain biker, and José Ignacio Labarta, who was at that time the assistant sports director ofComunidad Valenciana.[2]
In Fuentes' clinic in Madrid, 186 blood bags were found belonging to professional athletes and marked with coded names, besidesEPO,steroids, andgrowth hormone.[3] The scandal that grew from the arrests implicated well-knownroad racing cyclists and include former Tour de France favouritesJan Ullrich,Ivan Basso,Francisco Mancebo,Michele Scarponi,Tyler Hamiliton,José Enrique Gutiérrez Cataluña,Roberto Heras,Dario Pieri and large parts of theComunitat Valenciana and formerLiberty Seguros cycling squads.Alberto Contador was also a suspect, but was latercleared of any involvement by the Spanish courts and world cycling's governing body, theUCI. Fuentes continually denied having performed illegal operations. He said that he did not work exclusively with cyclists but had other athletes as clients such as footballers and tennis players.[4] In December 2010, a fellow inmate claimed Fuentes had told him, "If I would talk, the Spanish football team would be stripped of the 2010 World Cup".[5] Fuentes denied having said this in a 2013 interview.[6]
In a further doping scandal, in 2010, Fuentes was arrested by Spanish police as part ofOperación Galgo (OperationGreyhound). In a series of simultaneous raids across five provinces on 9 December, Spanish police seized a large quantity of anabolic steroids, hormones andEPO, as well as laboratory equipment for blood transfusions. According toPúblico newspaper, Eufemiano Fuentes and his sister Yolanda were the leaders of the alleged plot. Also arrested were the athleteMarta Domínguez, who was released on bail after having been charged with the trafficking and distribution of doping substances, and Alberto Leon, in whose fridge anti-doping police found several bags of blood. Leon was found dead shortly after, the result of an apparent suicide.[7]In January 2013, the Operacion Puerto trial went underway, and Fuentes offered to reveal the names of all the athletes he helped doping. The judge, Julia Santamaria, told him that he was not under obligations to name any other athletes others than the cyclists implicated. Fuentes stated that he supplied athletes in other sports with drugs and said: "I could identify all the samples [of blood]. If you give me a list I could tell you who corresponds to each code on the [blood] packs."[8]
Spain lacking anti-doping laws, Fuentes was charged with "endangering public health".[9] His main defense consisted in saying that the blood transfusions were conducted safely and were healthy for the athletes.[10] This point of view was highly contested, notably by former clients and cyclistsJesús Manzano andJörg Jaksche, who claimed that the blood transfusions were performed in dangerous conditions and put their health at risk.[11]
In April 2013, Fuentes was sentenced to one year in prison for breaking public health laws and was banned from practicing sports medicine for four years.[12] On 14 June 2016, the verdict was overruled and Fuentes was cleared of all charges. However, 211 blood bags from his laboratory were handed over to the World Anti Doping Association for investigation.[13][14]
"Tour de France: Inside the Blood Doping Investigation".Der Spiegel. 10 July 2006. Retrieved18 November 2022.