Puerto: the depressing truth. Capodacqua speaks

Last week Repubblica published a piece by the great Eugenio Capodacqua on the current state of Puerto. It doesn't make pretty reading. The words "and weep" come to mind.

Fuentes: the scandal uncovered

How the doping of Fuentes was wiped away. The Civil Guard wanted to go forward: Football and Tennis in their sights.

Barcelona: In an office of the court of Madrid, under a light covering of dust, there are twentyone folders of court documents. Wiretaps, interviews, analyses, reports. Documents that just two years ago had the power to change the history of sport but that instead are today called by all in the court "El Cadaver": the corpse. This is what is left of Operation Puerto, the investigation by the Civil Guard that in 2006 brought to light the largest doping ring in history. If someone were to carry out an autopsy on this investigation he would discover that it did not die of natural causes, but was assassinated. The oxygen was taken from it - that is the money - and the blood was vanished, literally.

The fact that something seized up the great investigative machine that between February and May 2006 led to the arrest of Dr Eufemiano Funetes, a gynaecologist known above all as a wizard of EPO, Civil Guard Lieutenant Enrique Gonzalez understood almost immediately when he turned to Judge Antonio Serrano to ask permission to search Fuentes' house in the Canaries. Operation Puerto was already in the papers, and it was clear that the investigators had turned onto the right path. For this Gonzales found it difficult to believe the reply that was given by the judge: "We can't, we don't have the money."

Gonzalez knew that in his office in the Canaries the Doctor had a PC with data on his clients and other bags of blood, beyond those that had already been confiscated after the arrest. Material which led to what all the newspapers were already taking for granted: that to Fuentes there not only went cyclists, but also footballers, tennis players, basketball players and other athletes. The Civil Guard had found important leads in telephone taps and followed a pair of tracks that led to the top of La Liga. The Spanish cyclist Jose Manzano, already charged, had confirmed: "Through Fuentes I personally met one of the stars of La Liga." In a magazine interview showbusiness star Jonny Halliday told that he had been rejuvenated thanks to transfusions in a cclinic suggested to him by his friend Zidane. To the investigators the comparisons were useful, however. And these were from Fuentes to the Canaries. But Serrano blocked everything.

The golden years of Spanish sport had begun. The country identified itself with its heroes, in Capello's Real [Madrid], Zidane and Raul, in Nadal, in Alonso. What reason was there to risk destroying such a citadel of emotion. And so as soon as the word Liga appeared in the inquiry everything stopped before an "insurmountable" legal problem: Doping at that time was not a criminal offence. A rock that until then had always been cleverly circumvented but that from that moment onwards became a tombstone. And the inquiry stopped.

From May 2006 onwards - between formal closures and reopenings - the proceedings have not managed one single step forward. It has rather made many steps back. One of the most dramatic of these has been published only today when it became known that of the circa 250 bags of blood confiscated from Fuentes (the number is approximate because, in another anomaly, no-one has ever taken the trouble to make an inventory of them) more than a hundred are lost or have perished. No-one will ever know if those bags belonged to cyclists or other sports players. Just as no-one will know who paid for the services of Fuentes. No-one ever went to Switzerland to ask for information on doctor's UBS account. Today, the investigation has been reopened for the umpteenth time, but this is only a formal reopening that will lead perhaps to the conviction of Fuentes but will not take a single step forward. Even if they will it, and that will has yet to be shown, it would be impossible. Not only on account of the organic deterioration of the blood, but also because they are missing other basic building blocks, such as the computers seized from Fuentes in the first phase of the inquiry: they have never been "opened" nor cloned. Their contents are either lost or contaminated. And to avoid taking risks, Gonzales and his men were transferred to other inquiries. Today they hold meetings on doping, throughout Europe.

6th March 2009