05-04-2013, 10:55 AM
Quote:Cycling's 'Doping Doctor' Eufemiano Fuentes says he worked with 'football, boxing, tennis and athletics'
The Spanish doctor accused of masterminding one of sport's most notorious doping scandals admitted in court on Tuesday that his client list included athletes from "all kinds" of sports.
Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, 57, told the Madrid court he worked on a private basis with athletes outside of cycling, the sport which was heavily implicated in the Operation Puerto investigation by Spanish police.
"I worked with cyclists but also footballers, boxers, tennis players and athletes," said Fuentes, whose case has taken seven years to reach court. But Fuentes told the court he was helping athletes deal with anaemia issues rather than performance-enhancing doping and at one stage said the EPO hormone-boosting supplement police found when they raided his premises in 2006 was part of his daughter's cancer treatment.
The first to be called to the stand, Fuentes detailed the procedures he administered to athletes but insisted they posed no risk to their health.
He and four others are accused of involvement in the widespread doping of professional cyclists but are charged with breaking public-health laws rather than incitement to doping, which was not a crime in Spain until late 2006.
The judge yesterday ruled that data found by police, and suspected to prove his links to sportsmen outside of cycling, is not admissible because of breaches of privacy.
Police raids on premises linked to Fuentes in May 2006 saw the seizure of some 200 bags of tampered blood labelled with a complex system of codes and a virtual pharmacy of performance-enhancing substances including EPO, human-growth hormone, steroids and testosterone.
The Worldwide Anti-Doping Agency is demanding access to the blood bags so it can carry out DNA testing in an effort to trace the athletes involved. The court has given it three days to make a formal request.
The case implicated 58 named cyclists and after being shelved by an investigating judge twice was reopened amid mounting pressure from anti-doping agencies. In what promises to be a blow for the defence, the judge granted a request by Wada to add cyclist Tyler Hamilton to the witness list.
The former team-mate of Lance Armstrong described Fuentes as a "one-man Wal-Mart" of doping in The Secret Race, the explosive autobiography in which he exposed illegal performance-enhancing practices while with the US Postal Service team and then with two European teams.
In court yesterday, Fuentes detailed his work with sportsmen describing how they came to him for "medical advice, physical and medical tests to ensure their health would not be at risk". Insisting that he worked in a private capacity with individual sportsmen and not teams, he and his business partner - Dr José Luis Merino Batres - extracted blood and stored it for transfusion at a later date to help maintain adequate blood viscosity levels.
"In some moments sportsmen could have very viscous blood, so we removed some and froze it to be used if needed at a later date," he said. "If the athlete later suffered a low haematocrit level or anaemia, we returned the blood for health reasons."
But Fuentes, who said the majority of his clients by 2006 were cyclists, insisted that he "never carried out such procedures during competition" and only during training or after a race to boost their health.
He admitted that on some occasions the treatments were carried out in hotel rooms near his offices "to preserve the privacy of clients".
The trial is focusing on the process of the extraction and transfusions as well as the storing of the blood in order to prove whether any health infractions took place.
The court heard details of the complicated coding process used by Fuentes and Merino - who was to be a co-defendant but was last week granted a temporary stay because he is suffering Alzheimer's disease.
More revelations are expected with the testimony from dozens of professional cyclists who will be called as witnesses during the two-month trial.
Jesus Manzano, a former cyclist and the whistleblower who first alerted authorities to Fuentes alleged role in the doping network, is one of the plaintiffs in the case and is due to take the stand next month.
In a pre-trial media interview he revealed he had seen several footballer clients of Fuentes visit the clinic including "a footballer who plays in the Spanish national team" and "two Brazilian players in the Spanish league" but declined to name them.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersp...etics.html