Eufemiano Fuentes

Eufemiano Fuentes (born 1955) is a Spanish sports doctor, well 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, 186 blood bags were found belonging to professional athletes and marked with coded names, besides EPO, steroids, and growth hormone. 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, Tyler Hamiliton, 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. He said that he did not work exclusively with cyclists but had other athletes as clients such as footballers and tennis players. 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". Fuentes denied having said this in a 2013 interview.

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