Eufemanio Fuetnes, who is on trial over a major blood doping racket involving top professional cyclists said Tuesday he had worked for athletes in "all kinds" of sports.

   

"I worked on a private basis with individual sportspersons of all kinds," Eufemanio Fuetnes, 57, who is charged with public health offences, told the court in Madrid.

   

Police detained Fuentes in 2006 when they seized 200 bags of blood and other evidence of performance-enhancing transfusions, in an investigation dubbed "Operation Puerto". Fuentes, who is on trial along with his sister and three other defendants, told the court on Tuesday that "most" of the sportspersons he was working for in 2006 were cyclists. Investigators at the time listed 58 cyclists suspected in the scandal. Of the 58, only six have received sporting sanctions: Spain's Alejandro Valverde, Germans Jan Ullrich and Joerg Jaksche and Italians Ivan Basso, Michele Scarponi and Giampaolo Caruso, who was later cleared by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Fuentes's lawyer Julian Perez-Templado told AFP after Monday's hearing that the doctor would not reveal the names of any more of his clients. The defendants are charged with endangering public health rather than incitement to doping, which was not a crime in Spain at the time of the arrests. Fuentes denies that his treatment endangered the cyclists' health. He told the court that athletes in various sports came to him for "medical and nutritional advice, physical and medical tests to guarantee that their health would not suffer".

   

"Some wanted monitoring for a whole season, others had diseases, or a particular injury, or they wanted advice for a particular event," he said.