On Mon. d. 05 May. 2003 kl. 12:24 GMT, Qui wrote:
> when did he test at 60%?
never... the Mr. 60% label has a (true) story:
In the 1996 TDF the entire Festina team was highly doped with EPO and they tested _very_ high in
intaernal hematocrit test. Since Riis rode fatser than the Festina riders /they/ joked about it and
_assumed_ that Riis's hematocrit values had to be at least 60%. Their theory was that the only way
anyone could outride them, was if they had hcrt. values above their own (=above 60%) - Riis was the
only one to outride them, therefore they labeld him Mr. 60%.
I'm not saying that Riis wasen't on EPO, i think that there's a valid reason to asume that more than
90% of the peloton was on EPO in those years, that includes riders like Indurain, Rominger, Züelle,
Bugno, Chiapuchi, Ugromov, Jalabert, Pantani /and/ Armstorng <don't shoot me!>.(we allready do know
that the Festina team was on EPO).
However everyone seems to forget that Riis (and swiss Pascal Richard) was among the initiators
behind the introduction of the hematocrit tests in 1997. A test wich most of the pro-riders didn't
want, the initiators wanted the test - not to prevent the use of EPO, they assumed that that battle
couldn't be won without a pullet-prof EPO test, but in order to make shure that noone died or got
serously ill from their EPO useage. Their intention of the hematocrit test, was that it would
_force_ the riders and teams to be monitored by doctors and prevent fatal accidents from EPO.
Later on, in 1998, a dansih journalist (Olav Skåning Andersen, OSA) publiciced a series of articles
and hidden camra recordings he made when he held a job as a soigneur at Gewiss-Ballan (in either 94
or 95), where he worked undercover in order to find out if doping in professional cycling was
orginaized by the teams or by individual riders. His documentation states that the Gewis-Ballan
riders was using EPO and that they where closely controled and monitored by the Teams official
doctor (Ferrari). OSA found transcripts containg the hematrocrit values of the Teams Giro squard
from thier preperations prior to the Giro. Ugromov, i think, had a value above 57% as the highest
(by a large margin). The transcript contained names like Berzin, Furlan, Goti, Chengialta, Riis and
others. All of them had periodicly values above 50% but execpt Berzin none of them where near the
57% of Ugromov.
So far we only have insight from 1,5 pro-teams + a series of cases against Italian sports doctors.
The fact is that we only have documentation from what went on in _two_ teams, and both of them shows
that they did use systematic doping.
Festina due to the documentation in the Villy Voet trail. Gewis-ballan, partially from the
documentation provided by OSA.
Since we don't have _any_ documented inside information from other teams there is no reason to
belive that they had a different approch to the use of doping. In fact the ongoing cases in Italy
indicates that almost all riders did use EPO in a more or less sytematic way - either orginized or
with the blessing of their teams.
--
Venlig hilsen Morten Reippuert Knudsen...
Besides, if you can't get a decent kernal panic <icq://131382336> or two in a month, what's the
point of living? <aim://reippuert