2006 T-Mob Tour Team... doped

Anti-doping campaigner says problem was widespread on T-Mobile in '06
By Agence France Presse
Filed: December 31, 2007
A German anti-doping campaigner has accused all nine riders competing for the T-Mobile team during the 2006 Tour de France of blood doping.

"According to information I have, the entire T-Mobile team went (to the University Clinic Freiburg) and resorted to blood transfusions," Professor Werner Franke told German radio in an interview to be broadcast on Tuesday.

Only one rider from the 2006 team, German Patrik Sinkewitz, who was last month given a one-year ban for a failed drugs test, has admitted he used doping products and practices while riding for T-Mobile.

Former team leader Jan Ullrich retired in February having been sacked by T-Mobile in July 2006 after he was linked to Eufemiano Fuentes, the Spanish doctor whose blood doping network was exposed in last year's Operación Puerto investigation.

"This information is considered so compromising that for the moment there has been no enquiry," claimed Franke, a biology professor from Heidelberg and a leading campaigner against doping.

Led by Andreas Klöden, who moved into second overall after Floyd Landis was found to be guilty of testosterone use, T-Mobile won the team standings at the 2006 Tour. Four of their riders finished in the top eight in the seventh stage, a 52km time-trail won by Ukrainian Sergei Honchar, sacked in 2007 by the reorganized team for an abnormal blood analysis result.

T-Mobile, the mobile phone division of German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom, announced last month that it was ending sponsorship of the team after a succession of doping scandals.

The team now operates under the name High Road and includes Australian rider Michael Rogers, a member of the T-Mobile team in the 2006 Tour. Klöden now competes for Kazakh-financed team Astana - which was also embroiled in a doping scandal during the 2007 Tour de France when team captain Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for blood doping.

Rogers and Klöden have consistently denied doping.

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"Bait in 08" --nns1400

Not really that surprising, although it might end the career of Kloden and make life for Rogers/Stapleton quite a bit more difficult. What I don't understand is why Ullrich used Fuentes when he could've used the guys from Freiburg U just around the corner from where he lived. Did he get more out of Fuentes than the Freiburg guys were willing to do? Was the Fuentes connection something he cultivated from his time away from T Mobile? Did he think he was less likely to be discovered with Fuentes instead of with the Freiburg guys? Or was it simply that Fuentes did the same job for less? From a team perspective, it can't be good that individual riders go off to different places for their gear. The potential for discovery gets too high. And if the new MO is 'one guy caught = team ban' the stakes are too high. Better for the whole team to gear up at the same place (which ideally should only work for your team and no one else). So, when the **** hits the fan, you're still utterly farked, but the likelyhood for that to happen is so much smaller.
In that sense, the Freiburg U connection was probably ideal for T Mobile (and whatever Bruyneel/LA were doing for Tailwind). So, has anyone a good guess why Ullrich went to Fuentes?

Good question. We will never know with certainty. I guess it was Pavenage preferenze (o influenze) for staying apart from the main struttura. May be it was his twisted idea of segrecy.

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For inches and centimetres, let fools contend."
-- Damian Grammaticus

I think that U freiburg were more professionnel and didn't wanted to risk the health of athletes, maybe they would only provide blood transfusion in their office... Fuentes was able to have his "mobile" office delivering fresh blood at rest stages!

Good point. And not every doctor was concentrating haemoglobin in the same way IMO...some were probably including other "additives".

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Is this doping homologous or autologous? If the former, I wonder how many cases were actually discovered and covered up.

To bump up. Thanks

Sevilla introduced Ullrich & Pev to Fuentes.... Freiburg was more experimental and wasn't as sophisticated as Fuentes..... The Fuentes gold membership came with the lot..... Blood doping, micro EPO doses, test avoidance and complete confidentially - ie the T-Mobile boys had to sit in the waiting room watching each other get a transfusion - Ullrich had complete privacy and no one else knew what he was doing.... Ullrich with the amount of press attention he got in Germany & Switzerland couldn't afford to be seen entering in and out of Freiburg U....... Freiburg would have been part funded by T-Mobile and not in the same realm as the Fuentes program...

A lot of good answers.

Concerning this question:

I would assume most blood doping would be autologous. This is much harder to detect (no need for twins) and safer.

Edit: not homologous but autologous as mentioned below.

I think you mean autologous (receiving your own donated blood).

My own 2 cents...I think guys like Fuentes, Ferrari et al. likely have knowledge and real world experience the university doesn't have. An analogy is to go to a doctor's office and ask them how to properly use heroin. They likely won't know.

And as mentioned by others, I think the Univ. docs would be much more conservative in their use of doping products. I just wonder how someone finds out about someone like Fuentes. Do he or his handlers approach athletes? I can't imagine there is a lot of word of mouth recommendations.

I got a hunch that the U of Freiberg trail is perhaps going to lead to evidence that T-Mobile were fully aware of the doping program. Who else wrote the checks? The question is, if this were the case, do we really need to expose that knowledge of T-Mobile's (Deutsche Telekom) complicity?...Would there be any upside other than showing that the cyclists were more like pawns in the process rather than the "goats" they are presently "scaped" to be?

I understand, if it were true that T-Mobile were involved in this university doping program, why they hightailed it out of there so quickly.

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Here is Jaksche description of how he met Fuentos.

Spiegel: Have you ever spoken specifically about doping with Saiz?
Jaksche: No, it was more like “We know what it’s about.” He also never named Fuentes by name, just told me a doctor would call me. I knew Fuentes through hear-say, he called me shortly after New Year’s, I was in the mountains with friends. I went outside in the snow in order to not be overheard. Fuentes said: Hi, here is Eufemiano. He suggested I meet him in the Gran Canaria, where he lives. I went down.
Spiegel: When?
Jaksche: Mid January 2005. Fuentes picked me up in his beater Toyota. We got around to business pretty quickly and he went through his entire program with me. First he talked about Anabolika (e.g. tesosterone), which I didn’t want because big muscles are too cumbersome in the hills. Then about artificial hemoglobin, some frozen stuff out of Russia. That was too dangerous for me. Then we got to EPO, which I didn’t want because of the doping tests. He assured me that he had found something that will cover up EPO, which he gave me later in a small pill box, you just mix it with your urine sample. Fuentes basically went through his entire catalog and asked me which risks I was willing to accept. With risks, he meant in terms of getting caught, not health risks. That’s how we came up with using your own blood. The method was completely new to me at the time, but he talked about it very casually.

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For inches and centimetres, let fools contend."
-- Damian Grammaticus

Good stuff. Thanks!
Reading about his 'beater toyota' makes me think he's in it for something other than money. Maybe he thinks he really is providing a noble service.

Fuentes got 150000 Euros for 2006 doping work.