With more than 30 members of the peloton cited, Operacion Puerto was the scandal that eventually saw 1997 Tour de France champion Jan Ullrich admit to doping, and raised questions over the legitimacy of many careers.
At Puerto’s centre was Spanish sport scientist Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, and his infamous blood-bank freezer known as ‘Siberia’.
Puerto hit the headlines in 2006, after police raided three Spanish residences, two of which belonged to Fuentes. According to Cyclingnews, the raids netted “approximately a thousand doses of anabolic steroids and hormones… along with one hundred packets of blood, products to manipulate it, machines to freeze it and material to perform transfusions”.
Check out the rest of World War Cycling
PART 1: The Prologue
PART 2: The United States of America
PART 3: Italy
PART 4: Doping learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan
PART 6: Germany and Denmark
In The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton explains how in 2004 Fuentes, with whom he had worked for a number of years, sold him on the merits of freezing his blood in the Spaniard’s newly purchased medical freezer:
“He told me he would not be offering Siberia to all his clients, but only to a select few: me, Ullrich, Vino [Alexander Vinokourov] and Ivan Basso.”
Blood doping is one of the most effective means of enhancing performance in cycling, and doesn’t really involve drugs at all.
The practice sees a cyclist ‘donate’ blood when they are at peak fitness. The blood is then stored, before being re-injected into the cyclist’s body.
So a cyclist may donate a bag of blood weeks before the Tour de France, then as they begin to suffer in the race’s final week or so, they take a hit of their peak-time blood and the next day they markedly improve.
The downside is that in the days after donating, performance suffers – imagine training for six hours the day after losing a pint of blood – so timing a donation has to be managed carefully. The appeal with Siberia was that while a pint of blood can be stored in a standard refrigerator for around a month, through Siberia’s careful freezing and thawing process, Fuentes’ clients could theoretically store their blood indefinitely.
The kicker in blood doping is that for years the process was undetectable – how can you pop someone for having their own blood in their veins?
However a number of Fuentes’ clients got caught for having someone else’s blood in their veins, the suspicion being that some athletes were simply given the wrong bag.
It’s a theory given extra weight when you consider Fuentes worked with athletes from a number of different sports (including unnamed tennis and football players), so there were hundreds of blood samples found in Siberia.
Then there’s the fact Fuentes’ partner, Dr José Luis Merino, who was in charge of storing the bags using specific nicknames and codes for each athlete, was later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t just a case of get given the wrong bag and potentially end your career, injecting the wrong blood type into your body can be fatal. Spanish rider Jesús Manzano was the whistleblower whose confession led to the Puerto investigation, and a large part of his decision to turn supergrass was that he had suffered two near-fatal incidents following transfusions.
Hamilton himself eventually tested positive for having another person’s blood in his system, although he had a different take on why he got busted:
Here’s a motto for my generation of cyclists: sooner or later everybody gets popped. It works because it’s true:
Roberto Heras: 2005
Jan Ullrich: 2006
Ivan Basso: 2006
Joseba Beloki: 2006
Floyd Landis: 2006
Alexandre Vinokourov: 2007
Iban Mayo: 2007
Alberto Contador: 2010
It’s interesting that Hamilton lumps Alberto Contador in as part of “my generation”, because there’s 11 years difference in age between the two, and Contador is widely regarded as the finest rider of his generation – ‘his generation’ commonly regarded as the young, clean, modern brigade.
Last Sunday, Contador won the 2015 Giro d’Italia, and is now aiming to win next month’s Tour de France as well. If he is able to achieve the double in the same year, he’ll be the first man to have done so since Marco Pantani in 1998 (who, as we covered in Italy, was using EPO).
Contador is well aware of the history such a feat would create, telling Procycling earlier this year, “winning the Giro and Tour in the same year would put things on another level.”
Contador is already on ‘another level’, holding two Tour de France and Giro d’Italia titles, and winning the Vuelta a Espana three times.
However while he has two Tour and Giro titles, he has actually won both races three times, but his first place results in the 2010 Tour and 2011 Giro were stripped as a result of doping.
A month after winning the 2010 Tour de France, it was announced that Contador had tested positive for clenbuterol – a drug which improves aerobic capacity, and the body’s ability to metabolise fat.
Contador denied ever knowingly having taken the drug, and blamed it on a piece of meat he had ingested on one of the Tour’s rest days.
The meat was a fairly credible defence, given Contador’s ‘failed’ test was based on trace amounts of clenbuterol – such a tiny amount would have negligible affect on performance. What was perhaps a bigger problem was that another test found plasticiser in his blood.
Plasticiser is a chemical found in IV bags – the kind you would use if you were getting blood transfusions. And this wasn’t a trace amount; it was eight times the amount required to be considered doping.
It was an awkward connection, as Contador had been implicated in Puerto, with a large number of his then Liberty Seguros-Würth team named by Spanish authorities as being on Fuentes’ books, including one rider identified as ‘AC’.
The Spanish Cycling Federation initially declared they were satisfied with the contaminated meat explanation, and Contador continued to race, winning the 2011 Giro, and coming fifth at the 2011 Tour.
However WADA and the UCI were not happy with the decision and contested it at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
Ultimately, while it was decided that the plasticisers in the Spaniard’s blood were non-admissible evidence, Contador was found guilty of a doping offence, although CAS noted it was “likely to have been caused by the ingestion of contaminated food supplement than by a blood transfusion or the ingestion of contaminated meat”.
So not innocent, but not guilty; allowed to ride, but ultimately stripped of results.
Confused? Yeah, fair enough. But if you really want to tear your hair out, try working out Puerto’s legal results.
While dozens were implicated, only five riders – Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, Michele Scarponi, Jörg Jacksche and Alejandro Valverde – ever received suspensions for working with Fuentes.
Furthermore, during his 2013 criminal trial for endangering public health, Fuentes told the judge he could “identify all the samples”. “If you give me a list I could tell you who corresponds to each code on the packs.”
“All the samples” referred to the 211 blood bags seized during Puerto. Clearly these belonged to more than five people, and in fact Fuentes has gone on the record to say that some belong to footballers, athletes, boxers and tennis players (there’s even talk that while in prison he told a fellow inmate he had evidence that could see Spain stripped of their 2010 FIFA World Cup).
What did the judge say in response to Fuentes’ offer? “The request will not be made expressly” – in short, I won’t ask, so you don’t have to tell.
The blood bags remain untouched and untested, with another hearing to decide their fate – whether to discover to whom they belong, or be destroyed – due before June 2016.
Next week: Denmark and Germany, the Eagle and the Kaiser, and how a man who was stripped of his Tour title for doping had it returned.
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