Eufemiano Fuentes

Eufemiano Fuentes in 2000.

Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes (born 1955) is a Spanish sports doctor best known for being implicated in the Operación Puerto doping case.

Fuentes was once an athlete. He then became the team doctor of Team ONCE, Amaya and the Kelme. The former Kelme rider Jesús Manzano accused Fuentes of being involved with doping. Fuentes retired as the 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.

Fuentes was arrested by the Guardia Civil on May 22, 2006 together with four others: the manager of the Liberty Seguros team Manolo Saiz, José Luis Merino a haematologist 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 of Comunidad Valenciana.

In Fuentes' clinic in Madrid, 100 blood bags were found which were suspected to belong to athletes who doped. The scandal that grew from the arrests implicated well-known road racing cyclists and include former Tour de France favourites Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, Francisco Mancebo, Michele Scarponi, José Enrique Gutierrez Cataluña, Roberto Heras, Dario Pieri and large parts of the Comunitat Valenciana and former Liberty Seguros cycling squads. Alberto Contador was also a suspect, but was later cleared of any involvement by the Spanish courts and world cycling's governing body, the UCI. Fuentes continually denied having performed illegal operations and also said that he did not work exclusively with cyclists but had other athletes as clients such as footballers. However in December 2010, he is quoted saying: "If I would talk, the Spanish football team would be stripped of the 2010 World Cup".

In a further doping scandal, in 2010, Fuentes was arrested by Spanish police as part of Operación Galgo (Operation Greyhound). In a series of simultaneous raids across five provinces on 9 December, Spanish police seized a large quantity of anabolic steroids, hormones and EPO, as well as laboratory equipment for blood transfusions. According to Público newspaper, Eufemiano Fuentes and his sister Yolanda were the leaders of the alleged plot. Also arrested were the athlete Marta Dominguez, who was released on bail after having been charged with the trafficking and distribution of doping substances, and Alberto Leon, now retired from mountain biking, in whose fridge anti-doping police found several bags of blood.

External links

• Inside the Blood Doping Investigation - Spiegel International