The fight against doping is advancing, but in Spain its stories are repeated for decades, boring, lazy, tiring. Police investigations supported by the law that criminalizes doping, wiretapping, interventions… Names of products, intermediaries and doctors are repeated, sadly, whose knowledge and arts are passed from generation to generation. Only the names of the athletes change, the final objective of the practices.
The force feels the force. Twenty years ago, the cyclists of Operation Puerto asked Eufemiano Fuentes for Strength and he responded with some vials of growth hormone, HGH. Superman López asks Marcos Maynar, a lifelong doctor cited in dozens of doping cases in Spain and Portugal, for strength, the day after losing the 2020 Tour podium due to a disastrous time trial at the Planche des Belles Filles, and HGM , also included in the list of doping substances, the doctor from Extremadura sends you human menopausal gonadotropin or menotropin in short.
“Everything is air and strength,” summarizes Vicente Belda Vicedo. “They are what make the difference, oxygen in the blood and iron in the muscle.” Menotropin instantly increases testosterone in the blood, strength.
The veteran director of Kelme in the times of Eufemiano Fuentes and Operación Puerto has retired (he is 69 years old) but continues to mediate in the world of cycling, and this is what he told last September to the Cáceres judge Aída de la Cruz de la Torre, which is investigating him, his son and Maynar for alleged drug trafficking. “I have known Maynar since 2000, when I was director of Kelme and he, a sports doctor, collaborated with me and other teams. In 2004, Maynar was part of the Kelme medical team as a subcontractor, and we have always been friends. Now my relationship with cycling is reduced to my work with Óscar Sevilla [ciclista albaceteño, aún en activo en Colombia a los 47 años, también implicado en la Operación Puerto] to search for teams in Europe for the best young Colombians. Superman? I was the right arm to take him from Colombia to Astana, in 2015 and his half-representative with his father-in-law, Rafael Acevedo,” Belda tells the judge, whom she also wants to impress with her catalog of illnesses, restless legs, herniated discs, and to cure them, he explains, he receives packages with medicines that his friend Maynar sends him from Cáceres, including, curiously, a shipment of Actovegin, an unauthorized substance in Spain known as the poor man’s EPO, already made fashionable in the peloton by Lance Armstrong more than 20 years ago and that it is not at all indicated for Belda’s illnesses. “It was for my consumption,” the former Alicante cyclist insists before the judge. “I have a medical certificate. Maynar sent it to me because the medications they prescribed me were messing up my memory, and I wanted to ride a bike again. What if Actovegin is doping? Well, it’s something quite old, let’s say. Now it is no longer. I have taken it and I know it.
Afterwards, Belda talks more about Superman López. “At the end of 2018, Superman, so ungrateful, tells me that he no longer wants me to represent him, and leaves with Giovanni Lombardi,” she laments. “I took him out of nowhere and when he started making good money he left me. He tasted very bad to me. I had been his second father. He lived with me in my house in Cocentaina. And I broke off relationships. “My son worked at Astana as a masseuse.”
Vicente Belda García, Vicentín, Belda Jr., relates, and the telephone interventions and dumps confirm it, how on the last day of the 2020 Tour, Superman, depressed, told him that the “supplementation” that the team was giving him was not good. “I told my father, who told me that his supplementation had to be changed and he called Marcos Maynar to do it,” explains Belda Jr. “I spoke with Maynar and he prepared a plan for the World Cup, which was a week later, and for the Giro, which would begin 15 days later.” In 2020, the year of the pandemic, the Tour ended on September 20, two months later than usual, and the Giro began on October 3, five months later than its traditional March dates. Although the Colombian cyclist left Astana for Movistar in 2021, Belda Jr. maintains that he continued his relationship with Maynar, and was still there in 2022, when he returned to Astana after his dismissal from Movistar for his unmotivated abandonment in the 2021 Vuelta.
With the Vinokurov team, which maintains a good relationship with the Beldas, Superman prepared the Giro and 10 days before its start, Belda Jr. says that the Colombian, residing in Andorra, called him to tell him that Maynar would send a package to his home in Cocentaina to take it to Budapest, where the Giro would begin on May 6. “He told me that he was afraid that he would not arrive in Andorra on time,” Belda Jr. told the judge. The Civil Guard, which had intercepted the call, intercepted the shipment and verified that the package contained four ampoules of HMG Lepori with the glass scratched to erase the inscription of the name of the medicine. “I receive the package from Maynar on a Thursday and I don’t open it until a few days later, when I’m packing for the Giro. Seeing that it had some blisters, I threw them directly into the trash. I risked being fired from the team if I carried them, because it is illegal to carry medication. Plus, I had to clear customs in Switzerland and Hungary, and I didn’t want to have any problems. If they stop me at the airport, my hair will fall out. And until the Civil Guard came to take my statement and told me, I didn’t know what the package had. [después del Giro]”.
Menu of 18 daily pills
Belda Jr. ends his statement before the judge by proclaiming: “I have nothing to do with any plot. “They wanted to use me as a camel, as a mule, to transport prohibited things.” The records of her tapped phone, her conversations and messages with Maynar, and his with Superman, tell, however, another story. On April 27, Maynar informs him that he sends him “about Miguel.” On April 28, eight days before the Budapest prologue, the doctor from Extremadura sends the cyclist a list with the menu of products (“supplementation”) that he must take the days before the race, before and during training, at breakfast , at dinner and before going to bed. They are tablets and capsules of minerals, vitamins, amino acids and plant extracts, 18 pills daily, including “coconut oil” capsules. To close the medication, before going to bed, subcutaneous testis injections. On April 29, Belda Jr. confirms the arrival of the package. “I’m taking him there,” he writes to her at noon. And a few hours later, Maynar informs López, who demands his “strength”: “Vicentín has it. I will give it to you as Testis.”
Combining emails, documents, messages, shipments and packages, the researchers have concluded that this “testis” is nothing other than the vials of the hormone menotropin (HMG Lepori 75mg) that Belda’s son has not thrown into the trash, as he claims. , are that he has transported them to Budapest and that he injected them. And this is confirmed by a message from Maynar on May 5, when the cyclist informs him that his legs hurt, that they are swollen, and that he does not feel well. “Miguel, the thing about the legs is fluid retention in the testis,” he assures him. And López asks him his doubts: “Let’s see if I have a bad reaction to one of the new vitamins you sent me.” As Superman does not improve, Belda Jr. asks Maynar to send him a prescription for the anti-inflammatory diclofenac. “It will be difficult for the doctor [del equipo] “he explains,” he explains, a phrase that shows that the relationship between López and Maynar develops behind the backs, and in secret, of the Astana doctors. To mislead, Maynar issues the prescription for the injectable diclofenac in the name of a third person, an Italian masseuse on the team. Despite all the efforts and secret injections, López does not improve. He has no strength in his left leg, surprisingly, and abandons the Giro on its first Italian stage, on May 10, before beginning to ascend Etna.
The interrogation of the Beldas, father and son, and the details of their relationship with Maynar and Superman López, appear in the summary of Operation Ílex, the Civil Guard investigation that Judge De la Cruz de la Torre is about to launch. close after receiving the report in which the prosecutor assigned to the case, Sonia Castañeda, has requested the prosecution of Maynar, Belda Sr., and two other people, commercial agents of the drug trafficking plot (article 361 of the criminal code ). The same prosecutor, however, has not found evidence of a doping crime (article 362 quinquies) in the transfer of menotropin from Cáceres to Budapest and to the Giro d’Italia via Alicante in the suitcase of Vicente Belda Jr. and its alleged end in the body. and Superman’s blood. “It could not be sufficiently accredited or which athlete they were intended for.” [los inyectables] nor to which athlete they were intended and in relation to what specific competition, nor if it has been consumed or, to what extent, the effect produced nor the danger that this medication may cause with its ingestion,” the prosecutor points out in the writing in which he requests the dismissal and archiving of the proceedings.
The prosecutor’s conclusion contrasts with that of the ITA, the anti-doping unit of the International Cycling Union (UCI), which found in the same investigation sufficient evidence of doping last July to provisionally suspend Superman López for “use and possession” of a doping substance (menotropin), and highlights the practical impossibility in Spain of applying the Penal Code against doping, which does not persecute the end user, the athlete, but rather the environment that prescribes, provides or administers it and considers that The athlete’s health is the protected legal good and not the cleanliness of the competition. It must be proven that the medication has caused “a dangerous situation for the athlete’s health,” says the prosecutor, downplaying the medical importance of the illness, caused by the medication, that forced Superman, one of the favorites, to abandon the Giro. .
When the Civil Guard informed the Astana boss, Alexander Vinokurov, of all the facts at the end of 2022, he fired Superman, Belda Jr. and the Italian masseuse whose name was used for a useless prescription.
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