Jörg Jaksche admits doping

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The birds are singing…

German Jörg Jaksche, one of dozens of cyclists implicated in the Operación Puerto doping scandal that erupted last year, admitted Saturday that he used banned substances for years.

“I’m Bella. It’s my blood which was found in three bags (at Dr Fuentes offices). I was a client of Dr. Fuentes from 2005 to 2006 in Madrid,” admitted the 30-year-old former T-Mobile rider.

At Telekom from 1998 to 2000 he said “team leaders knew everything (about doping). It was a deeply embedded system.”

Source: velonews.com.

A “deeply embedded system.”

Let that one roll around in your mind for a while.

Jaksche said that he first used EPO in 1997 while at the Polti team and that he also doped while at Team Telekom, Once, CSC and Liberty Seguros.

He said he got a “crash course” in doping from at Polti from team boss Gianluigi Stanga, now the head of the Milram team, in June 1997.

“It was my crash course. A team assistant gave me a shot of EPO in my room,” Jaksche said.

“I did what I had to do to be better in my job. The logic behind it is that you adjust your performance level to that of the others because everyone is doing it (doping). You live in a parallel world in cycling. “

Source: jurnalo.com.

*edit* I had to add this additional quote from the jurnalo article.

“Fuentes effectively outlined his entire catalogue and asked what risk I was prepared to take. He meant the risk of being caught, not the health risk. That’s how we got to doping with your own blood.

“The method was completely new for me, but he talked about it like others talk about changing nappies. “

*end edit*

At the bottom half of the same velonews.com page, Alexandre Vinokourov admits to “working” with Michele Ferrari.

I’ve only got one question: What the hell does “working” mean?

Tour de France hopeful Alexandre Vinokourov has admitted to working with a tainted doctor but denied it was for purposes of doping. Leader of the Kazakh-financed Astana team, Vinokourov enters the Tour as a top favorite. He admitted Saturday that he had used the services of Italian doctor Michele Ferrari, but not for medical products.

Ferrari was found guilty of sporting fraud and malpractice in 2004 before winning an appeal two years later.

“Michele Ferrari is a physical trainer but not my doctor,” said Vino in Saturday’s edition of French newspaper l’Equipe. “All I did was listen to people, like Mario Cipollini, who said great things. (Lance) Armstrong also worked with him. I didn’t want to miss out on this experience, I contacted him.”

Oh, so you phoned him up because he was in the winner’s circle? Or maybe it’s because he famously said, “EPO is not dangerous, it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink 10 liters of orange juice.”

I wonder if paying for Ferrari’s services would be an issue with this new UCI Charter everyone is signing? If your home number is in his rolodex… What can I say? It looks bad. If you wrote this guy a check for raking leaves in your lawn, it looks bad. Contact, period, bad, period.

In case anyone needs some background on the good doctor, here are parts one and two of an excelled interview by Tim Maloney at cyclingnews.com.

One more thought before I sign off on this one: Ferrari’s contribution of the V.A.M. calculation to the body of cycling knowledge (further info available in articles section of 53×12.com) may prove to be his undoing. Or at least that of some of his clients.

How, you ask? I’ve seen some things recently where people plugged in the numbers for a cyclists performance, to see what kind of wattage, O2 uptake, VO2, etc, had to have occurred for that performance to occur. And there are some pretty otherworldly numbers out there.

As in, it couldn’t have happened without some serious medical assistance. For example, you can train all you want, but the gaseous exchange rate (really simplified, O2 in, CO2 out) between the air in your lungs and the fluid in your veins is a more static number. The volume of air in your lungs increases, but that is not the only factor that’s important. I should have paid a lot more attention in math class, because it gets way me beyond quite quickly. But, suffice to say, some of the numbers people have come up are off the chart. They’d need to have a whole lotta red blood cells for the math to work. Way above normal numbers.

I hope to have more on this later.

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