Operación Puerto 20 years on: The doping investigation that tore cycling apart

Pat McQuaid had only been the president of the International Cycling Union (UCI) for eight months when the governing body’s lawyer, Philippe Verbiest, knocked on his office door on the morning of May 23, 2006. “He came in and said: ‘Pat, a big scandal is about to drop in Spain’.”

Not another one , McQuaid would have been forgiven for uttering. At the time, cycling was a byword for cheating. Eight years earlier, the Festina affair had almost led to the Tour de France’s abandonment, while just months before McQuaid assumed the presidency role at the UCI, Lance Armstrong won the last of his seven yellow jerseys — victories he’d eventually be stripped of in 2012.

The last thing cycling wanted — or needed — was another seismic doping episode, and especially not during the final week of the Giro d’Italia, which was happening concurrently. But that’s exactly what transpired.

What unfolded was a scandal that even today has more unanswered than answered questions, with many of the rumored athletes involved never being formally linked to Fuentes. It would taint Spain’s sporting reputation for decades to come. But along the way, cycling would become the sport in focus, unfairly McQuaid believes, with a Tour de France winner and a Giro D’Italia champion temporarily banned from the sport.

“Word started filtering through that the Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes was involved,” McQuaid remembers, speaking to The Athletic . “Within 24 hours I was in Madrid.”

After a three-month investigation setting the foundations for what was to come, Operación Puerto had been launched by Spain’s military police, the Guardia Civil, to uncover a sophisticated and extensive doping ring that was focused on blood doping and performance-enhancing drugs. Blood doping was still undetectable at the time and had come back into vogue in the early 2000s after a test to detect synthetic Erythropoietin (EPO) — the endurance drug of choice during the 1990s — was successfully rolled out at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

When McQuaid arrived in the Spanish capital, he demanded as much information as possible from the investigators. “I asked how many cyclists were involved,” McQuaid says.

“They wouldn’t give me a definitive number but they said up to 100 athletes from four or five different sports, and cycling was one of them. My thoughts flying back to Aigle (the UCI’s base in the Swiss Alps) were: ‘Well, it’s bad, but at least we’re not the only sport involved.'”

McQuaid’s presumptions about other sports sharing equal blame and retribution were to be proven wrong — this became another doping story intrinsically linked to cycling. “For a long, long time, it’s annoying me that cycling was the only sport to be really hit by it,” he rues.

Twenty years on, cycling — and the wider anti-doping landscape — continues to feel the effects from Operación Puerto, one of the sport’s darkest chapters among several gloomy eras.

“It left a very black mark on cycling,” McQuaid admits. “Festina was industrialized doping: not just one guy in a room injecting himself, but complete teams having doping operations. That took a while to overcome. Then Puerto came along and it again looked like athletes had found a new way. And the UCI’s hands were tied in terms of taking action against the cyclists thanks to doping not being a criminal offense in Spain so there was limited evidence sharing with the UCI.

“How do you face that? How do you defeat it, deal with it? One of the top teams’ sponsors called me up and said: ‘If cycling doesn’t get to grips with this, we’re not going to have a business of cycling; the business will completely fold’. It was up to all of us to ensure nothing like this ever happened again. We all needed to up our game.”

The origins of Puerto — Puerto means mountain pass or ‘col’ in Spanish, giving the operation a distinct cycling theme — can be traced back to March 2004, when the Spanish newspaper AS produced an extensive report covering the confessions of the ex-Kelme Costa Blanca cyclist Jesús Manzano.

In it, Manzano blew the whistle on what were, he alleged, the widespread doping practices that had taken place during his time at Kelme, detailing the substances and methods, including EPO and blood transfusions, he said were being used, the people involved, including Fuentes, and the locations where blood transfusions were carried out. Manzano claimed that he thought he was going to die as a result of doping on two occasions.

Vicente Belda, manager of the Kelme team, denied Manzano’s allegations: “What he is saying makes me sick. He is not telling the truth. Our lawyers are working on this.”

Rather than Manzano’s words leading to an immediate investigation, he was instead the subject of death threats. The Spanish police took note of Manzano’s claims but it would take another revelation for them to begin to take action.

That occurred when recently-crowned 2005 Vuelta a España winner Roberto Heras of Liberty Seguros tested positive for EPO — a result which was later overturned in the Spanish courts. Even so, this provided the catalyst for the investigation into Fuentes to get underway, as his team manager Manolo Saiz claimed Fuentes doped riders on his Liberty Seguros squad.

Fuentes was a well-known figure in Spanish sport. He had worked with the Spanish Olympic team at their home Barcelona Olympics in 1992, and had also been on the payroll of the Spanish ONCE cycling team in the 1990s. Additionally, he had connections with football, boxing, tennis and athletics.

The Civil Guard began investigating Fuentes in February 2006, and in the course of three months, they listened in on phone calls and photographed and filmed suspected doping clients entering clinics and hotel rooms. They were guided by Manzano’s claims when they raided certain addresses in Madrid and Zaragoza.

In a central Madrid hotel on May 23, 2006, police found Fuentes meeting with José Luis Merino Batres, the head of haematology at a local hospital and an ex-director of a transfusion center, and Saiz, the manager of Liberty Seguros.

The trio were arrested and police obtained 10 mobile phones and business cards that were annotated with codenames such as: ‘Kelme, new 6, Czech’ and ‘Clasicómano Luigi’, ‘Bella’, ‘Falla’, ‘Birillo’ and ‘Valv-Piti’ — the last two involving riders whose dogs had those names. Saiz was found in possession of €60,000 in cash and a number of doping products. He claimed the cash was for his team’s operations and also denied ever doping his riders. and was later cleared of wrongdoing, as was the haematologist.

Properties were simultaneously raided and 185 blood bags and 39 bags of frozen plasma were seized, each with a name or codename, a number and a datafile written on them. Steroids, corticosteroids and hormone products (many of which had expired) were uncovered in refrigerators. In keeping with his giving most of his clients a codename, Fuentes referred to frozen blood bags as ‘siberia’ and performance-enhancing drugs as ‘bocadillos’ — baguettes.

Investigators also found a list which referred to the “participants in the festival that takes place in the month of May” — widely taken to be a not very subtle attempt at referring to the Giro d’Italia. But very few of the blood bags were ever formally linked to particular athletes, and that ultimately limited the number of people the authorities could investigate, particularly in Spain.

But the list caused reverberations which were immediately felt in Italy and in Germany, where, unlike in Spain, doping was by now a criminal offence, and thus authorities in those two countries were able — and crucially were willing — to punish athletes.

Italian rider Michele Scarponi abandoned the Giro the day after the scandal broke, and German star Jan Ullrich, who won the 1997 Tour de France, followed not long after, citing back pain. No rider was formally associated with the aforementioned codenames until late June when the Guardia Civil confirmed their identities, which caused an understandable sensation in the cycling world. Scarponi was known as ‘Zapatero’ and ‘Presidente’ and Ullrich as “Rudico’s son”.

Ivan Basso, who had won the Giro just five days after the raids, was also eventually suspended. He was confirmed as a client of Fuentes by Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) in April 2007, and he later admitted to his doping, saying that he had never infused at the 2006 Giro, but had intended to blood dope at the ensuing Tour de France.

Spanish newspaper El País reported that a majority of the Comunidad Valenciana team (formerly known as Kelme) were clients of Fuentes, as they were half of Liberty Seguros’ 29-man roster. Both teams strongly denied the doping allegations, and no action was ever taken against any of their riders but their title sponsors withdrew in the coming months — in the case of Liberty Seguros just two days after the raids. The Tour de France subsequently drew their race invites — as well as excluding Basso and Ullrich, (riding for Team CSC and T-Mobile respectively) who were the two pre-race favorites for the yellow jersey.

Eight years after the Festina affair that almost brought down the 1998 Tour de France, cycling was once again deep in the quagmire. McQuaid had an almighty job on his hands—but the Spanish law was intent on thwarting him.

“My approach was to get as much information as we could and we were determined to rid the sport of anyone involved in Puerto,” McQuaid says. “The UCI’s lawyer agreed, but he said we needed concrete evidence. And getting concrete evidence turned out to be very difficult.”

The Civil Guard listed Spanish cyclists Óscar Sevilla (codename: Sevillano), Joseba Beloki, Luis León Sánchez and Alberto Contador as patients of Fuentes. The riders all denied any involvement in doping. Because doping didn’t become a criminal offense until November 2006, crucially after Puerto had begun, investigators did not legally have to identify who the various blood bags belonged to, nor who was a client of the doctor.

“Spain never had any real rush to do that much about it,” McQuaid continues. “They never delivered the names and without evidence there was nothing we could do.”

Judge Antonio Serrano of the presiding court in Madrid explained that his hands were tied behind his back and he could only prosecute crimes against public health, meaning only the doctors responsible — and not the athletes — could be tried.

“The Spanish minister of sport and head of the Spanish Olympic Committee, along with the police in charge of the investigation, promised me that they’d get to the bottom of it all,” McQuaid says. “But we never got full cooperation from the Spanish authorities.”

In 2007 and 2008, Judge Serrano closed down the case, reasoning that the levels of EPO in the blood bags did not endanger lives. In 2009, Judge Serrano’s decision was overruled by a superior court, but because of the size of the case and the number of people involved, it wasn’t until January 2013 that a criminal trial against Fuentes and a handful of others for endangering lives was finally held.

But the courts couldn’t try anyone for doping. This denied the riders the opportunity to formally clear their names if not guilty, or the sport to take action if anyone was found to have broken the rules. The inability to act in Spain left a cloud of suspicion hanging over the sport.

But while Spain’s authorities hesitated to act, other countries did not.

CONI successfully requested that Spanish authorities hand over specific blood bags to them so that they could prosecute criminal trials locally. Italian police then seized upon the opportunity to prosecute Alejandro Valverde in 2009 when the Spaniard gave a blood test inside Italy’s borders during a 2008 stage of the Tour de France. They matched his DNA with one of the blood bags. Valverde was later handed a two-year suspension by CONI that the UCI upheld.

Beyond the fact that the Puerto case blew up during the Giro, there was extra motivation within Italy to probe, as Italian doctor Luigi Cecchini had been accused by Manzano in his 2004 claims — and by subsequent reporting in the Italian press which claimed he had administered Fuentes’s doping programs in Italy. Cecchini denied wrongdoing and ultimately never faced court proceedings.

In Italy, doping was already a criminal offense and, as a result, the Italian trio of Scarponi, Basso and Giampaolo Caruso were all named as Fuentes clients by their own country’s judiciary system and each banned by CONI with the UCI confirming the suspensions.

Likewise, in Germany, local authorities decided to pursue athletes caught up in Puerto. Jörg Jaksche (codename: Bella) was sanctioned for a year by German authorities and in 2007, he admitted to working with Fuentes. Germany then reeled in their biggest catch: the country’s beloved but flawed 1997 Tour winner Ullrich (codename: Rudico’s son).

Ullrich was linked to Fuentes via wiretaps and €80,000 payments, and when German investigators raided his house during his honeymoon, they matched his DNA to nine blood bags that had been confiscated in Fuentes’ offices.

In a 2023 Amazon Prime documentary about his career called ‘The Hunted’, Ullrich described the doping regime. “Fuentes asked me: ‘Which traffic light do you want to go through? Green, yellow or red?’ It was immediately clear to me — these are the risk levels. I said: ‘Always green.

Another Fuentes client, although not racing at the time of the Puerto scandal, was American cyclist Tyler Hamilton. He got a taste of the dangers when his urine turned black after one transfusion went wrong during the 2004 Tour de France. He was banned for two years for testing positive for blood doping at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Crucially, Hamilton’s sample showed someone else’s blood in his system.

In his award-winning 2012 book, The Secret Race, Hamilton — who claimed to have paid Fuentes €25,000 a year for a cocktail of EPO, growth hormones, testosterone and insulin — spoke of clandestine meetings in service stations and hotels, and of him and other riders communicating with Fuentes on throwaway, secret phones.

Dutch cyclist Thomas Dekker — who admitted in his book The Descent that his Puerto codename was ‘Clasicómano Luigi’ — said that it cost €10,000 to store a blood bag in Fuentes’ freezer.

In 2013 — seven years after the revelations first surfaced — a criminal trial finally took place in Spain, led by Judge Julia Patricia Santamaría. It involved only officials, and not athletes. Fuentes was initially found guilty of public health violations and was handed a one-year suspended sentence, while José Ignacio Labarta (a coach at the Comunidad Valenciana team) was handed a four-month suspended sentence, also for public health offenses.

But in a decision that enraged sporting authorities across the world, Judge Santamaria ordered the 200+ seized blood bags to be destroyed on the grounds that courts had no legal framework to hand such evidence over for sporting sanctions against athletes.

Both rulings — the convictions and the destruction of the blood bags — were overturned three years later in 2016, however, and Fuentes and Labarta were acquitted on the grounds that blood doping was not a crime against public health under any specific Spanish law in 2006.

It did at least mean that WADA were handed the seized blood bags, and in 2019, they said they had identified 11 athletes after analyzing the bags. Due to the 10-year statute of limitations, however, WADA was unable to name the athletes.

Still to this day, only six of the more than 50 cyclists whom the police had originally identified in 2006 as being involved served bans for working with Fuentes, and only three others have revealed that they too had been his clients. No one else has been investigated — no doubt because of the delay in releasing the blood samples needed as evidence to support any investigation.

No athletes from any other sports have ever been identified.

Speaking to Spanish radio during the 2006 Tour, Fuentes said: “I have done the same thing with other sports,” he said, referring to doping. “I have given advice on treatments for football teams, athletes and tennis players, among other sports. My professional oath forbids me from revealing their names. There have been only selective leaks. I am outrageous about that.”

Referring to the 1992 Barcelona Games, in which Spain recorded its still highest-ever medal tally, Fuentes’ wife and a hurdles runner at Seoul 1988, Cristian Pérez, told the Spanish La Provincia newspaper in 2008: “I know what happened in 1992 and I’m a Pandora’s Box that, if opened, could bring down sport… I could speak out and ruin all those caught up in this little world.”

FIFA insisted that no footballer was a client of Fuentes, but French newspaper Le Monde claimed in 2006 that Fuentes had worked with Real Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Valencia and Real Betis. No evidence of that was ever produced, and the newspaper paid Madrid €330,000 and Barcelona €300,000 for damaging their names. Real Betis and Valencia also denied having any relationship with Fuentes. He, though, later claim to have worked with Real Sociedad in a 2021 TV interview with La Sexta. Sociedad did not respond to that interview, but in 2013 had denied working with Fuentes.

Despite other sports being involved, it was cycling which bore the brunt of the scrutiny and fascination surrounding the long-running case. “It hurt me because it was another negative story on cycling,” McQuaid says.

“But what frustrated me most is that it dragged on and on and on, and it seemed to us at the UCI that they (Spain’s authorities) really didn’t want to let the information out about the cyclists because if they did, they would have to do the same for the other athletes.”

Spain’s willingness — or rather lack of it — to fight doping damaged its attempts to host the 2020 Olympic Games in Madrid. Bidding for the Games, which eventually went to Tokyo, took place in 2013, the same year as the Puerto trial case, and Spanish chiefs bemoaned how “out of 20 questions… six or seven were about doping.” Some delegates also raised the issue of Puerto on stage.

Due to the Spanish authorities’ handling of the case, many athletes were never uncloaked as Fuentes’ clients, and their doping remains a mystery to the outside world, with no one sure how many medals were immorally and illegally obtained.

Yet out of the wreckage of Puerto came the tool that would ultimately help cycling turn a page, with the fallout accelerating the development and introduction in 2008 of the athlete’s biological passport (ABP). By tracking an athlete’s blood values ​​and other biological markers over time, the ABP has undoubtedly strengthened the fight against doping.

“As soon as the ABP became available, the UCI was the first international federation to use it,” said McQuaid, who served as the UCI president from 2005 to 2013. “I didn’t think it’d turn out to be as good as it has been but to my mind it’s done a huge amount.”

However, neither the UCI nor McQuaid have been immune from criticism over their handling of Puerto and also anti-doping in general, despite the successes of the ABP.

Since Puerto, positive doping cases in cycling have averaged around 20 a year for the past decade, with no more than five annual positives from the WorldTour in that time frame. In October 2025, for example, Spanish rider Oier Lazkano was provisionally suspended for irregularities in his blood passport related to his time at the Spanish WorldTour team Movistar between 2022 and 2024. An investigation into Lazkano by the International Testing Agency (ITA) remains ongoing and the rider has denied the allegations.

There’s no naivety that the sport is truly clean — there remains great concern, especially over the potential abuse of substances and of methods in the so-called gray area — but the culture does appear to have fundamentally changed for the better.

“Coupled with the ABP, attitudes changed among teams, their owners and the cyclists themselves,” McQuaid says. “They knew the doping couldn’t continue.”

When McQuaid watches racing on TV now from his home 50km from Dublin, “I feel a certain amount of pride and satisfaction that I helped the sport to come to the position it’s in today,” he said.

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