19
‘What great news! What’s sure is that it’s unfair you’ve been caught up in this game of politics . . . someone who’s always been on the cyclists’ side. They are compromising your work and the way you share an ideal – improving, excelling and trying to be the best . . . a guy who’s always been in the battlefield, eating dust, getting behind us and listening to their “sensations” so you can look for whatever remedy it is that will ease the fatigue, the pain, the injuries, the fears, the pressure . . . pulling your end of the rope, rowing in the same boat as us, looking out for our health . . . because that’s the way it is, Eufe, and it’s not right. I’m sending you my very best and I hope people don’t forget you . . . Whatever happens, there’ll only ever be one genius’
—Text message to Eufemiano Fuentes from an unidentified sender, 20.47, 29 May 2006 (translated from the original Spanish by the author)
At lunchtime on the day after the 2017 Vuelta a España’s grand finale a few streets away, the rustle of beech leaves and rhythmic to-and-fro of the Chamberí district’s well-healed residents give the Calle Alonso Cano in Madrid an ambiance at odds with dark secrets from the neighbourhood’s recent past.
Of late, Chamberí has become one of the Spanish capital’s most sought-after barrios – a haven of authentic or castizo charm dotted with the buds of gentrification. Fancy burger joints have sprung up alongside family-run ironmongers; traditional tabernas with blackboards advertising their cocido madrileño flank ateliers and boutique hotels. The apartments have pastel facades and wrought-iron balconies. Number 53’s much more utilitarian, grey breeze-block construction therefore draws the eye. So, too, given the context, does the name of the restaurant I notice directly opposite: ‘La Fuente’.
It’s close enough.
At half past three on the afternoon of 12 May 2006, a Friday, a gynaecologist from the Canary Islands named Eufemiano Fuentes shuffled down the marble-floored corridors and under the yellow-beamed canopy roof of Madrid Barajas airport’s Terminal 4, as he had done countless times before. The difference on this day was that Fuentes was not only being watched by airport CCTV cameras but also listened to by Spanish police on two of the half dozen mobile handsets, most of them blue and silver Nokia 6310s, with which he would regularly contact friends, family, some of the world’s best cyclists and their advisors.
Two days earlier, permission had been granted for the Guardia Civil to begin tapping Fuentes’s phones as part of an investigation into possible crimes against public health that they were calling Operación Puerto – Operation Mountain Pass. They had been conducting video surveillance on Fuentes and a few of his presumed accomplices since the middle of March, with immediate results: at 8.30 p.m. on the very first day, José Luis Merino Batres, an ageing cardiologist with suspected links to Fuentes, left Number 53 Calle Alonso Cano carrying a white plastic bag then dumped it in a bin in a parallel street. The Guardia Civil recovered the bag, examined the contents and found remnants and residues that pointed towards the manipulation of blood and transfusions. They had also established that Fuentes was renting the apartment.
Now, on the phone, the investigators were plunged immediately into the doctor’s wild, wild world. Within two hours of landing in Madrid, Fuentes had thanked Merino Batres for ‘saving his life’. A miscalculation in their planning the previous winter – or perhaps just them underestimating demand for their services – had led to a shortage in their stock of SAG-Mannitol, an additive solution that helped to preserve frozen red blood cells. It was just as well Merino Batres had a contingency plan, because Fuentes reminded his friend that ‘this weekend is important, because you know it’s the one with the . . . the thing with the . . .’
Soon Fuentes would be telling Merino Batres that ‘Birillo’ had called to say that he ‘wanted more’, as did ‘the other one’. The more they listened, the more the Guardia Civil began to make sense of Fuentes’s coded language – a patois punctuated with ellipses and innuendos suggesting first, that something sinister was afoot, and second, that the protagonists either knew or feared that they were being spied on. Later the strange names – the Birillos, the Zapateros, the Hijos de Rudicio – would also have to be decrypted. Eventually, the Spanish press would give the Lingua Fuentes – its numbers, symbols and pseudonyms – its own appellation: ‘The Sanskrit of Eufemiano’.
For now, the Guardia Civil just listened.
‘This one is for Siberia. It’s the one Ali Baba took to send to Siberia . . .’
‘Go to the pizzeria. As you’ll understand, this is done at the pizzeria . . .’
‘I want to save the weekend, because, boy, people are coming from abroad . . .’
In a call at 6.30 in the evening, Fuentes told Merino Batres, ‘So I think that with that, at least the urgent things, the one that’s coming from . . . abroad, German and Italian, I’ll see them . . . but the rest can fuck off and I’ll tell them that I’m very sorry, and that . . . there have been problems with supply.’
For Eufemiano Fuentes this frantic day ended long into the next one, after a text message to an Italian telephone number, in Italian: ‘I need to know what time you’re arriving tomorrow.’ In conversations the following day, Fuentes told anyone who called that he had been up all night.
More than once, the neighbours above and below the apartment in the Calle Alonso Cano had complained to the housekeeper, Ignacio, that a strange, mechanical whirring noise rattled the walls and shook the floorboards.
For Jan Ullrich, the sixth day of the 2006 Giro d’Italia would be an easy one. It began in the central Italian town of Busseto, where Giuseppe Verdi was born and the locals are equally proud of their famous salame – culatello. Ullrich had started the race overweight but now he was beginning to look the part. According to his teammate Serhiy Gonchar, Ullrich had been flying in the team time trial the previous day. In fact, he had fairly vacuumed the Ukrainian into the race leader’s pink jersey.
As the peloton beelined across the plains of Emilia-Romagna, it was noticeable how nimbly Ullrich’s legs twiddled astride his Giant bike – his 120 revs per minute cadence exceeding even Armstrong’s in his egg-beating pomp. It was a big change for Ullrich, whose speed of rotation sometime resembled that of a railway turntable.
Neither Ullrich nor Rudy Pevenage had mentioned anything in public, but in fact there had been a change. At his annual training camp in South Africa in the winter, Ullrich had felt a familiar pain in his right knee that got worse over several days. Eventually, his physiotherapist, Birgit Krohme, decided that they needed to get help. Krohme had been coming to South Africa since long before she met Ullrich, and had contacts at the Sport Science Institute of South Africa (SSISA). When Krohme called, Jeroen Swart, the head of the cycling division, and the physiologist Ross Tucker said that they would be happy to examine Ullrich and see what they found.
Swart remembers Ullrich being ‘one of the most pleasant, professional guys I’ve ever worked with’. He also recalls an athlete who had an obvious problem with an even clearer cause. In the right knee that Ullrich had damaged in 2002, an MRI scan showed patellar tendinopathy, a common overuse injury sometimes referred to as ‘jumper’s knee’. Isokinetic and ergometer tests also gave strong indications as to how the issues had started; Ullrich’s pedalling stroke was lopsided, with a pronounced right-leg, right-hip bias. His mechanical efficiency – what his bike got out compared to what Ullrich put in – was poor for an elite cyclist, and very poor at low cadences. When Swart and Tucker reviewed clips of Ullrich from the previous Tours de France, pennies dropped like dimes in a Vegas casino: Ullrich’s gears had got bigger and his cadence lower as the years had gone by. And the harder he ground the pedal cranks, the more crooked he had become, and the more he may also have gained weight.
‘What we saw was that over the years he’d gradually lowered his cadence from typically above 80 revs per minute to below seventy,’ says Swart. ‘The lower the cadence, the more asymmetrical he was, the more he relied on his quadriceps, and, also, the less able he was to respond to accelerations, because he couldn’t generate the torque. He wasn’t fat when we saw him – his bodyfat was about 10 per cent. It was all muscle because these big gears were basically resistance training and they’d made him heavier.’
For years, Ullrich had argued that smaller gears didn’t suit him, while others, like Peter Becker, thought either ego or laziness were getting in the way. Now, over the weeks and months that followed, Ullrich finally made a smooth transition to the 85 rpm can-can Swart and Tucker prescribed – and saw immediate improvements in both his knee and key performance markers.
At the Giro, Ullrich hadn’t had time for a look around Busseto and he also may not have known much about Giuseppe Verdi. Parallels with one of Verdi’s most famous operas, La Traviata, and a finale in which Violetta suddenly, miraculously rises from her deathbed exclaiming ‘Oh joy!’, apparently cured of disease, would therefore be pure operatic licence.
Then again, no sooner does Violetta get up than she falls again, this time never to stir.
From where the Guardia Civil were sitting in Madrid, the mid-May days of Eufemiano Fuentes seemed to fall into a predictable rhythm. Which is in no way to say that they were dull. The doctor himself was getting more and more agitated, his anxiety levels foreshadowing the synchronized crescendos of the Giro and the cycling spring – or some dark premonition. On the fifteenth, there was more talk of late nights, of stress and of the glycerol 57.1 per cent solution for which he and Merino Batres were searching high and low, from Seville to Valencia to Germany. Fuentes was also now damned sure they were being watched or listened to. He could hear a strange humming noise on two of his phones.
A new, central character in the Operación Puerto mini-drama was also about to enter the fray. ‘El Gordo’ – ‘The Fatty’ – Fuentes called him. Whoever he was, Fuentes had arranged to meet him in Madrid on the afternoon of 15 May, and their rendezvous was piquing the curiosity of Fuentes’s co-conspirators. Fuentes, it seemed from a conversation with the Kelme team’s directeur sportif, Ignacio Labarta, was not readying himself for a joyous reunion with an old friend. ‘I don’t want any kind of compromise – I just want to see money,’ Fuentes said. The pair speculated about whether El Gordo would use the meeting to fish for information. He already seemed desperate to suss out whether Fuentes and ‘Birillo’ were somehow linked, given how well the latter was performing in Italy. They also expected Fatty to forage for intel about ‘his own guys’.
What Fuentes wouldn’t do, he told Labarta, was pull any punches. He intended to tell El Gordo, ‘You didn’t pay me and I ended up without the rider and without the money.’
Fuentes’s paranoia was hindering the investigation – but it also clearly went against his nature to exercise caution. Every now and then there would be a slip. The investigators only had to wait. It was hard to know at this point who or what were ‘El Artista’, or ‘The Artist; ‘Manos Pequeñas’, or ‘Little Hands’; ‘El Bigotés’, or ‘Whiskers’. But on 14 May a few cats had scampered out of bags as Labarta and Fuentes briefly discussed the results from the day’s stage of the Giro d’Italia.
Fuentes seemed pleasantly surprised to hear El Búfalo had finished fourth. Labarta added that Birillo had come in sixteen seconds down. Among the riders who had lost twenty seconds was Zapatero.
The investigators scanned the results. In fourth place was the stoutly built José Enrique Gutiérrez, surely ‘El Búfalo’. Birillo could only be one of three riders: Serhiy Gonchar, Davide Rebellin or Ivan Basso. And of the trio of possible Zapateros, the clear frontrunner was the Italian whose name, Scarponi, meant ‘boots’ in English . . . and zapateros in Spanish. There was no mention of the thirty-sixth rider across the line, Jan Ullrich, or any nom de guerre that might point in his direction.
Yet.
The next day brought further worries, notably about ‘an old bottle at the back of the freezer’ that Merino Batres was sure could still be used. ‘If it goes wrong, I’m going to be fucked – I mean we’ll all be fucked but it will be my fault,’ Fuentes told Merino Batres.
There was at least more good news from Italy, delivered in a text message from a Swiss number, congratulating Fuentes on events at the Giro. Fuentes had watched the race on TV and later spoke to Labarta about the victory of ‘a strange one, the CSC [rider], Basso, a certain Ivan Basso.’
‘A certain Ivan Basso,’ Labarta echoed approvingly.
‘Fuck, yeah,’ Fuentes purred.
Having seen Verdi’s birthplace, it was time for Jan Ullrich to go to the home of another iconic Italian ‘V’ – the Vespa. The famous scooters were invented in 1946 in Pontedera, near Pisa, and now Ullrich summoned all of his horsepower in the Giro time trial heading out of and back to the town on 18 May. These were roads that Ullrich knew as well as any, from all the time he’d spent in Tuscany at Fattoria Borgo La Torre. While there, he also still occasionally trained behind Luigi Cecchini’s Vespa.
By the evening there would be plenty of talk of Ullrich ‘going like a motorbike’. He blitzed the 51-kilometre course in just under 59 minutes. ‘I wasn’t even firing on all cylinders at the start,’ Ullrich bragged later. He was only in Italy for training, he repeated; his priority was the Tour.
Ivan Basso had also ridden brilliantly in the pink jersey to finish second.
The best day of Jan Ullrich’s Giro also turned out to be a fruitful one for Guardia Civil in Madrid. On 17 May they had heard more about ‘Ali Baba’ and confirmed that Fuentes knew they were listening to his conversations when he told one caller that they should ‘speak on the other phone because this one is tapped’. Bafflingly, two hours later Fuentes was talking on the same device, with the same number, to the Colombian cyclist Santiago Botero. Botero had ridden a poor time trial at the Volta a Catalunya, and Fuentes wished to reassure him. ‘The artist Botero will paint amazing landscapes when he starts painting with Colombian felt-tip pens,’ he said. Whatever that meant.
Fuentes had later phoned Iberia airlines to book a flight to Madrid for the following day, the eighteenth, returning to the Canaries on the nineteenth. He was especially insistent about one thing: that his seat be near the emergency exit.
At 11.27 p.m. a text landed from a number the investigators hadn’t previously seen. The dialling code was Belgian, the message in Italian. It said, ‘Friend when can we speak for a minute. Rudicio.’
The next day, the day of Ullrich’s time trial tour de force, there was a call from the same Belgian number at twenty past midday. Fuentes was busy, couldn’t really speak. Later in the afternoon didn’t work for ‘Rudicio’ because, as he told Fuentes, ‘it’s the time trial’. It would have to be that evening. It was urgent, Rudicio said. Good, because they needed to ‘sort the dates for June’, Fuentes agreed.
Then came a long conversation with Labarta at 16.40, with the race still on. The pink jersey was going well, Fuentes said. He was the ‘only one who can take victory from the guy leading at the moment who’s German, this . . . Ullrich.’
As the Giro had edged closer to the Alps, on the third weekend, slowly the German press pack started to swell. Ullrich’s victory in Pontedera had caused flurries of interest in newsrooms which usually only had eyes, ears and correspondents for the Tour. A handful of reporters had been dispatched to Italy to get their audience with Der Kaiser.
One writer, Klaus Blume, believed that he’d landed his big Ullrich scoop a couple of months earlier. In his 2011 book, Des Radsports Letzter Kaiser, Blume wrote that in March 2006 he had got a tip-off from a good source that Jan Ullrich was about to get busted for doping. The source didn’t know exactly when, how, or by whom, but Ullrich would soon be exposed. Over the next few weeks, Blume heard the same rumour from at least one other contact.
Eufemiano Fuentes had a hundred things to do and ‘a thousand things in my head’, he breathlessly told an unidentified caller on 19 May. The stress was exacerbated by Fuentes sensing that he was a marked man. ‘Just remember, this phone’s being tapped,’ he told his sister, the Kelme team doctor Yolanda.*
The next day, 20 May, at 10.44 a.m., the Italian-speaker with the Belgian number, ‘Rudicio’, phoned to announce that he had spoken to a ‘third person’ on the bus and he ‘perhaps wanted to do something’.
At 11.32 came a text from the same number: ‘Franciacorta near Brescia.’
Among the many unsolved mysteries was why Fuentes kept talking, kept texting, kept feeding the Guardia Civil. It was hard, indeed, for the investigators to know whether this was simply his modus vivendi, pinging between contradictory states of agitation and recklessness, or whether the outlaw had started to glimpse the outline of an endgame. On 21 May, he prefaced one seemingly coded exchange about diluting yoghurts in water with ‘a greeting to those who are listening to us’. Was he taunting them, certain that the various decoys, euphemisms and nicknames were enough of a smokescreen? Or was Fuentes so used to living on the edge that he had become desensitized?
The Guardia Civil had heard him mention a flight booking from Las Palmas to Madrid on the evening of 22 May and a room reservation at the hotel Tryp Diana ahead of a proposed meeting with ‘Fatty’ in Madrid the following morning. They had also heard Merino Batres agree to go with him. There was more talk of debts, and Fuentes wanting to prove to Merino Batres that he had acted in good faith – ‘because of the friendship between us’. Fatty owed them all, Fuentes reminded Merino Batres, including ‘Little Hands, Whiskers and Ali Baba’.
‘Fatty’ also had a name, a real one: he was called ‘Manolo’. The Guardia Civil had by now also figured out his last one: Saiz.
And his position: the manager of the Liberty Seguros cycling team.*
Extending from Brescia to the southern shores of the Lago d’Iseo, the emerald vineyards of the Franciacorta region produce small quantities of the most refined sparkling wine in Italy. Not that Jan Ullrich would have much opportunity to indulge his burgeoning oenological interests on his one-night stay on 22 May.
One T-Mobile staff member had also been too busy for cantina visits despite not attending the race in the afternoon. As one of the team’s soigneurs, it was Johan Van Impe’s job to drive ahead to the team’s evening billet, put luggage in rooms and generally prepare for the riders’ arrival. On this particular day, Rudy Pevenage had also told him that a package would be delivered to the hotel. Van Impe should collect it.
Van Impe was still en route, behind the wheel of one of the team vehicles, when his mobile phone rang and he picked up to hear what he thought was a Spanish voice gabbling words he couldn’t understand. Van Impe hung up, only for the same caller to ring again. This time he worked out that the man was a friend of Rudy’s. Confirmation came in a text message from a number with a Spanish dialling code a few minutes later: ‘Soy el amigo de Rudy estoy en el hotel’ – ‘I’m Rudy’s friend and I’m in the hotel.’
When Van Impe pulled up in the hotel car park not long later, a middle-aged man he didn’t know, had never seen before, was already waiting for him. Moments later, the man was wheeling a small, Samsonite trolley bag across the tarmac, leaving it at Van Impe’s feet and gesturing that it should go straight to Rudy’s room in the hotel.
The man got back into his car and left, and Van Impe did what he was told. Van Impe didn’t know then and never found out what was in the trolley bag.*
Once again, on 23 May, Eufemiano Fuentes’s day didn’t so much start as spill over from the previous night. ‘Tutto OK. Rudicio’ – ‘All OK. Rudicio’ – said a text message to Fuentes’s mobile late on the 22nd. Only when the sun was rising at around five a.m. did he finally climb into bed in his Madrid hotel room.
The meeting with Manolo Saiz – aka Fatty, the one they had all been talking about for days – would happen in the bar of the Hotel Pio XII at 11 a.m. sharp. Merino Batres and Saiz joked about Fuentes’s abysmal time-keeping as they sat waiting and the minute-hand ticked through the hour and towards ten past. Exactly 11.10 was in fact the time at which Fuentes hurried out of the front door at another nearby address, number 20 on the Calle Caidos de la División Azul, carrying a green plastic bag. He turned right. Right again at some traffic lights, took a call on one phone, hung up and then started talking on a different one. Finally he walked through the reception doors at the Hotel Pio XII and to where Merino Batres and Saiz were sitting.
The Guardia Civil knew because they were watching – this time not on video screens but from a position outside the window.
There were no listening devices in the hotel but at one point Fuentes handed the green bag that he had brought with him to Saiz.
At 11.50, their meeting over, Saiz and Fuentes stepped outside and were met by agents in Guardia Civil uniforms. By now, as per a warrant signed the previous day by the Madrid judge Antonio Serrano, officers had also poured into four Madrid properties owned or rented by Fuentes and Merino Batres, who was about to be apprehended inside the Hotel Pio XII.
Ignacio Labarta and Alberto León, a former mountain biker the Guardia Civil believed to be the ‘Ali Baba’ in Fuentes’s pantomime of forty or probably many more thieves, had also been arrested at their homes in Zaragoza and San Lorenzo de El Escorial respectively.
Throughout the afternoon, the black Nokia the Guardia Civil had taken off Eufemiano Fuentes kept ringing. Dozens of calls and a steady stream of text messages, including one at half past two from someone who identified themselves as ‘the wife of Serrano’. She wanted to talk to Fuentes. She hoped he could explain something about ‘Marcos’.
Marcos Serrano, a thirty-three-year-old former Tour de France stage winner, had been riding the Giro d’Italia for Manolo Saiz’s Liberty Seguros team. Had been, because Serrano fell ill in the evening after stage twelve and was rushed to a hospital in Tortona. He stayed there for four days, after which he would spend another ten in a ward in Vigo, north-west Spain, receiving treatment for what Italian investigators believed was drug poisoning.
Serrano subsequently claimed that it had been a normal virus and that his wife was calling Fuentes because the Spanish Embassy wasn’t aiding their efforts to repatriate him and they needed Fuentes to help translate.
Eufemiano Fuentes sat waiting for his lawyer to arrive at the Guardia Civil’s main police station in the Calle de Guzmán el Bueno, making a mental inventory of what they could have found and its possible repercussions. At the Calle Alonso Cano apartment that they presumed to be the hub, the nerve centre of Fuentes’s operations – and the place he and Merino Batres referred to as ‘la pizzeria’ – the Guardia Civil had discovered sixty-eight bags of blood and forty-five of plasma. A further ninety 450 ml packets of blood had been removed from fridges in the apartment in the Calle Caidos de la División Azul.
There were also hundreds of pages of documents from various drawers and files – from calendars to invoices and even post-it notes. In Fuentes’s wallet alone, there were seven SIM cards to go with the three Nokia phones that he’d been carrying – the black one, a blue one and another that was silver.
There was also no telling what compromising evidence had been found on Merino Batres, or ‘the old man’, as Fuentes had unflatteringly called him in discussions with other members of their network. Had he known, Fuentes would probably have been relieved to find out that Merino Batres had at least been trying to keep track of who was who in their portfolio of clients – although perhaps not thrilled with his lack of discretion; in the cardiologist’s wallet, the Guardia Civil had found the business card for a seafood restaurant, the RAFA, with a handy key on the back.
It read ‘1. HIJORUDICIO 2. BIRILLO . . .’ all the way down to ‘33. CLASICOMANO’.
At the Giro, it was one of those days when just stepping outside of the press room felt like a dereliction of duty. The action was happening not at the finish line but on laptop screens and phones in the marquee filled with journalists. The news went around after the stage had already turned into a non-event, with Ivan Basso proving so superior on the climb to Monte Bondone that, as I wrote in my piece later, to the rest of the field he had become a ‘pink-tinted irrelevance’. I had covered enough Grand Tours by then, in the post-Festina era, to recognize and guiltily relish the buzz of a breaking scandal – the rustle of papers, the pitter-patter of keyboards, the hushed excitement. A trouble as much as a specific noise. It was happening now, as colleagues either sat staring at their screens or sprang out of their chairs. ‘Manolo Saiz arrested?!’ ‘And Eufemi– Eufemian—. . . Ah, yes, him.’
When he heard the news, at home in Texas, the newly retired Lance Armstrong seemed to immediately appreciate the magnitude of what had happened, and to whom. ‘What?! They caught Eufe?!’ Armstrong was said to have spluttered.
Basso gave his post-race press-conference in a poorly lit room which must have been the only available space up on the mountain, in the clouds swirling around the Bondone’s summit. But there was nothing noticeably shifty or nervous about his demeanour. Most reporters present knew one thing about Fuentes – that they had covered some murky story about the doctor, Ángel Casero and a message to Luigi Cecchini during the 2001 Vuelta. That was one link to Basso – Cecchini once having been his coach as well as Ullrich’s. But for now no one broached it.
The first hint that this went way beyond Saiz’s Liberty Seguros team came that night from a Spanish radio station, Cadena Ser. They claimed that Basso and Ullrich could both be on a list of 200 cyclists that Fuentes may have been treating. The following morning, Basso was put on the spot and said that he didn’t know Fuentes, had never met him. Jan Ullrich stepped out of the T-Mobile team bus and rode past the microphones, straight to the start line. This left Lothar Heinrich, T-Mobile’s pejoratively nicknamed ‘TV Doctor’, to tell the media, ‘There’s no truth to any of it.’
By late afternoon on the day of his arrest, more voicemails and text messages were arriving on Eufemiano Fuentes’s phones. Nothing like Clara Serrano’s, but rather expressions of support, solidarity, a shared sense of consternation.
A voicemail from his wife at 21.13 said that there were bigger problems in the world than what sportsmen do or don’t take and, anyway, it was the cyclists who came looking for him and not the other way around.
Text messages that would continue to arrive throughout the next day, most of them wishing him strength and, yes, justice.
In the meantime, the Guardia Civil had taken their first statements. Fuentes had told them the meeting with Saiz was about his daughter’s rare and serious eye condition, for Saiz had previously run a team sponsored by the blindness charity ONCE and still had contacts there; Saiz also said it was a ‘private matter’, although he admitted that Fuentes had previously treated some of his team’s riders, including Roberto Heras; Merino Batres confirmed that he had performed blood transfusions for elite athletes but always and only at Fuentes’s behest; León told them he was ‘Ali Baba’ and that Labarta was ‘Little Hands’; and Labarta said the drugs they had found in his home were for strictly personal use.
León, Labarta and Saiz were all released on the day of their arrest. For Merino Batres and Fuentes, it took three more days and bail of 120,000 euros each.
The Giro finished in Milan on 28 May with Ivan Basso winning by an enormous margin of nine minutes from the surprise runner-up, José Enrique Gutiérrez. On the evening of the 29th, Fuentes answered a phone call for the first time since his arrest, from his mother, and warned her they might have to wipe or swap a particular SIM card. Three hours later, he texted ‘Birillo’ to ask for his ‘other’ number, since ‘they’ had taken his address book. A few minutes later, there had been no reply, so Fuentes messaged a different Italian number. ‘Excuse me, madame, I’m the friend from [sic] Birillo and I need him to call me before to see me. Please tell your husband. He knows what to do. A thousand thank-yous.’
Jan Ullrich hadn’t made it to Milan – or even the summit of the Passo San Pellegrino and the end of stage nineteen on 26 May. At the bottom of the climb, Ullrich pulled off the road and into the car park of the Hotel Stella Alpina in Falcade, where T-Mobile were due to stay that night. He told a handful of journalists T-Mobile invited to the hotel that he had planned not to start the stage, but that would have looked ‘strange’ in light of the stories that had come out of Spain over the previous forty-eight hours. Those headlines linking him to Eufemiano Fuentes were just ‘sad’, Ullrich said.
It was put to him that, if the rumours intensified, the Tour de France organizers might ban him from starting their race.
Impossible, Ullrich said. ‘Someone who has nothing to hide also has nothing to fear.’