More fodder for Jan Ullrich’s upcoming and much anticipated tell-all memoir:
Former German cycling star Jan Ullrich was consulting Eufemiano Fuentes, the Spanish doctor whose blood-doping network was exposed last year, as early as 2003, according to reports in the German press.
Monday’s edition of the German weekly magazine Focus includes a report alleging that German prosecutors have seized receipts and documents that indicate the 1997 Tour de France winner had traveled to Madrid to see Fuentes.
The German has always denied using performance-enhancing substances, but prosecutors in Bonn charge that Ullrich had packets of his blood stored in Fuentes’ offices and had paid 25,000 euros to the Spaniard in 2004.
In November, Focus reported that Rudy Pevenage, the former boss of the Telekom cycling team, knew Ullrich had used the banned blood booster EPO in 1996.
Source: www.velonews.com/…13774.0.html
He paid Fuentes $25,000 euros? What is that in American dollars these days, $225,000? Gotta love that exchange rate. At this rate I may never step foot on European soil again.
In other fun new:
Five T-Mobile riders resorted to blood doping on the 2006 Tour de France, a newspaper report will charge on Saturday.
According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, the riders made a dash to the Freiburg University Clinic in Germany immediately after the prologue in the French city of Strasbourg.
There, the report alleges, they all received transfusions of their own blood, a practice outlawed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Source: www.velonews.com/…13772.0.html
Doping is as doping does. So, how long till the US Postal bombshells start dropping?
raise your hand if you are surprised . . . . . that’s what I thought
my hands are busy at the moment… one has a beer and the other… well… you get the idea.