[ad_1]
One of the most famous doping doctors in sports history retires and gives another fascinating and disturbing interview when he says goodbye.
In 2013, Eufemiano Fuentes had to answer for the doping scandal that surrounded him in a court in Madrid.
Photo: Javier Lizon (Keystone)
The name of the doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, known as the doping druid in 2006, is also synonymous with stories in Gran Canaria that can cause sleepless nights. Fuentes himself, retired, told one of them in a fascinating, morbid and morbid one-hour television interview with the Spanish journalist Jordi Évole, which is now broadcast in Spain on La Sexta.
One of the stories is about Fuentes’ uncle, a wealthy Canarian tobacco industrialist who was kidnapped in the mid-1970s and found dead, mutilated to the point of not being identified, the same day Fuentes graduated as a doctor.
Another story is about his cousin Eufemiano Fuentes, he was tried before the Supreme Court of Spain, just when the doctor of the same name had just been denounced as a drug addict. After a party, Cousin Eufemiano butchered a 24-year-old prostitute while intoxicated and threw her into a garbage container. Fuentes himself, the doctor: he had pumped athletes for years. Sometimes with drugs, sometimes with autologous blood, with methods that were not yet classified as doping when administered or used, as Fuentes claims.
But that is not true: the interviewer reads him twice of a sentence in which Fuentes was acquitted of public health violations, but nevertheless it is said: Fuentes treated the athletes to improve performance and made sure that they were not reviewed during flown controls. Among his clients: the winner of the German tour Jan Ullrich. What do all these stories mean? Perhaps at least this: that there are people who would have a greater need to write thick stories of their lives.
The government had “removed” him from the system
In an interview with Évole – it will be the last of his life, the 66-year-old man says – Fuentes puts many things in the room, including the detonation of two of the so-called bombs. One: that he was the victim of a political plot by the then recently installed socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, at the request of former Secretary of State for Sports Jaime Lissaveztky and with the help of Fermín Cacho, 1992 Olympic athletics champion. The other: Fuentes suggests something pregnant with meaning Silence that Real Madrid is … but on that in a moment. “Is that really that important?” Fuentes asks, looking at the interviewer with steel blue eyes.
A life like in a spy movie: Eufemiano Fuentes.
Photo: Emilio Naranjo (Keystone / EPA)
Fuentes, both for history, was once a track and field athlete, specializing in gynecology as a medical student because there was no sports medicine in Spain in the 1970s. He traveled to Eastern Europe, claims to have bribed his colleagues with a few hundreds of dollars to discover the secrets of the sporting successes of real socialism. A life like in a spy movie. Fuentes became a physician to the best Spanish athletes in the 1980s; Before earning a lot of money as a cycling doctor, he said that he looked after about 15 Spanish athletes at the Barcelona Games in 1992. Did he also instruct Fermín Cacho, who won the 1500 meters at the time and became one of the best Spaniards? sports heroes? “If I tell you that I don’t remember, you won’t believe me,” Fuentes says in an interview, after a few seconds of theatrical silence.
Only what is appropriate is cited
Cacho is said to have suggested to Fuentes in 2004, at the request of Secretary of State Lissavetzky, to prepare Spanish athletes for the 2008 Beijing Games. “Like in the eighties.” He, Fuentes, claims to have rejected it immediately. This “no” had consequences. Although doping was not a crime in Spain at the time, the Civil Guard in “Operation Puerto” instigated a unit to take action against organized crime, Fuentes says intentionally. As he did not want to serve the Spanish state, the government “had just removed him from the system.” He claims not to provide evidence.
Absurd, said Cacho of the newspaper El País, which also stated that Fuentes had settled in Portugal and continued to offer services. Lissavetzky made a similar statement. And he reminded everyone that from the beginning everyone was talking about Fuentes, at the latest through the accusing interview with the professional cyclist Jesús Manzano. His name does not appear in the television interview, like many other prominent names. Neither is there mention of “Operation Galgo”, the second major doping affair in Spain, in which Fuentes’ client Marta Domínguez, a successful medium and long distance athlete, was discovered. Former pro cyclist Tyler Hamilton’s book is cited insistently, but not from the passage when Hamilton was sitting in the cab after a visit to Fuentes and suddenly bleeding: Fuentes had obviously screwed up a transfusion.
What happened between Fuentes and Real Madrid?
It also becomes exciting when the discussion revolves around soccer. The dramaturgical structure is based on Fuentes’ admission that he would have liked to work with FC Barcelona, but did not; who also advised Real Sociedad San Sebastián, but not Valencia CF. Then comes the climax: “Did you advise the Real Madrid doctors?” There is a crackling silence for almost ten seconds. “I’m not going to answer that question for you,” Fuentes says, but: “That doesn’t mean, ‘Yes.’ I had to testify in a trial and I had to say ‘No’. ”
With these judgments, he alludes to the claim for damages that Real won against the French newspaper Le Monde, which reported that the club had used Fuentes’ services. And one more curious detail that Fuentes is getting rid of: Real promised to cover his travel expenses as part of the process. In the end, he had to sue for the money.
“What a pirouette!”
Who can be asked at Real Madrid if he, Fuentes, has worked for the record champion of Spain? Asks journalist Évole. There is another second of silence before the reporter asks another question. To know: Why did Fuentes call the head of Real Madrid’s medical department, Alfonso del Corral, so familiar “Alfonsito”. Fuentes responds with a strangely revealing question: “Are there other witnesses? No, there is no more. “- Witness of what? Asks the interviewer.” Witness of what I said (in the Le Monde trial, note) that it did not happen, “says Fuentes, so obviously his alleged collaboration with the real Madrid.
“What a pirouette!” The interviewer finally says. And they both smile. As if one knows what the other said through the flower, and the other knows that it is quite understandable, although he did not say anything explicitly. And so, in the end, some people stand there disappointed and watch the curtain fall, and many questions remain unanswered.
Found a bug? Report it now.
