• Anger at decision not to hand blood bags to drug agencies
• Spanish anti-doping chief calls for wider ban on sports doctor
Doping doctor Eufemiano Fuentes was today sentenced to one year in prison by a Spanish court for breaking public health laws by giving some of the world's top cyclists blood transfusions and banned drugs to improve performance.
Shocked sporting authorities around the world reacted angrily to the light sentencing and the judge's refusal to hand over more than 100 bags of frozen blood to anti-doping agencies so they could identify the cheating cyclists, athletes and, possibly, football players, who used Fuentes' services.
"We are disappointed in the decision," the UK anti-doping boss Andy Parkinson said." Fuentes has admitted to having been involved in multiple prohibited doping activities, and linked with multiple unnamed athletes. It therefore cannot be right that these names will remain unknown."
"It is shameful, I sincerely don't know why they bother charging a person in order to deliver a verdict like that," the former cyclist Jesús Manzano, who had sued Fuentes for damage to his health, added.
Judge Julia Santamaria argued that handing over the blood bags would contravene the rights of the sports stars who met Fuentes in hotel rooms around Europe to carry out clandestine transfusions.
Fuentes was banned from practising as a sports doctor for four years, but his sister Yolanda and two former cycling team managers - Vicente Belda and Manuel Saiz – were cleared. A junior coach at one team, José Ignacio Labarta of Comunidad Valenciana, was given a four-month sentence for helping Fuentes.
The sentence comes more than seven years after police raided his Madrid laboratories as part of Operation Puerto and found bags of refrigerated and frozen blood marked with codenames.
Many of the bags belonged to cyclists who wanted to be re-transfused with fresh blood during races. US Olympic-medal winner Tyler Hamilton, who told of secret meetings with Fuentes in hotel rooms, was one of those involved.
"As far as we are concerned Operation Puerto is not over," Spain's anti-doping agency chief Ana Muñoz said as she announced an appeal, saying the agency thought several of the accused should not have walked free. "I do not agree with the judge's reasons for not releasing the blood samples."
Muñoz said the agency might apply further administrative sanctions to those involved, including several cyclists. She urged Spain's medical authorities to widen the ban on Fuentes who, despite abusing public health laws, can still see patients outside the sports world.
"From at least 2002, he had been practising blood extractions, generally of 450mg each, sometimes with two bags of the same amount, to certain sports athletes, especially cyclists, for retransfusion later on, with the exclusive aim of artificially improving their physical performance," the judgment said.
The aim, according to the judgment, was to increase the red blood cell count. Fuentes also supplied cyclists with banned substances, including EPO, testosterone, insulin, and hormones.
"Fuentes carried out this activity by planning a system of extractions and re-transfusions and coordinating it with their physical preparations and the competition calendar with the double aim of optimising results and avoiding detection at anti-doping controls," said Santamaria.
She ruled that Fuentes had put the cyclists' health at risk, increasing their chances of suffering thrombosis, heart attacks, nauseas and vomiting as well as kidney and brain damage.
The clandestine operation with its secret codenames for patients also ran the risk of mixing up blood samples.
"Extractions and re-transfusions were not always carried out in authorised centre, but, on occasions, in hotel rooms that did not meet required standards of hygiene," Santamaria added.
Munoz said she was glad the judgment established that transfusion was a from of doping. Spanish law did not ban doping at the time of the raid on Fuentes' laboratory, meaning he could only be tried on public health charges. He is unlikely to go to prison, as sentences under two years are normally suspended in Spain.