Ivan Basso’s career was derailed in 2006 by Spain’s Operación Puerto investigation, a sprawling blood-doping case centered on physician Eufemiano Fuentes. Although Basso had just dominated the Giro d’Italia—winning the race by 9 minutes 18 seconds—his name surfaced among riders allegedly connected to Fuentes’s clinic. On 30 June 2006, the Tour de France organizers announced that Basso would not be allowed to start because the ProTour teams had agreed to exclude riders under serious doping suspicion, even though no formal sporting charge had yet been established against him. Team CSC eventually terminated his contract by mutual consent, and in October 2006 an initial committee acquitted him for insufficient evidence. Basso then signed with Lance Armstrong’s former Discovery Channel team, but the case was reopened by the Italian National Olympic Committee in April 2007, prompting his suspension and release from Discovery.
The decisive turn came when Basso admitted that he had contacted Fuentes’s clinic with the intention of arranging blood doping. He continued to insist that he had not actually transfused blood, describing the conduct as “attempted doping,” but acknowledged that attempting to dope was effectively equivalent to doping. CONI imposed a two-year suspension on 15 June 2007, backdating part of the penalty to account for his earlier team suspensions. His ban expired in October 2008, and he returned at the Japan Cup with a third-place finish. Basso later rebuilt his career, winning the 2010 Giro d’Italia, but the scandal permanently complicated his reputation: his 2006 exclusion came amid a major anti-doping investigation, while his own admission established that he had knowingly pursued an illicit blood-doping program even though the available evidence did not prove that he completed a transfusion.
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