issoisso wrote:
which probably means Valverde is going to walk this Tour. well...maybe not walk. but win.

Guido Mukk wrote:


Not shure with that eather...they still dig on this Valverde "Piti" blood bags. Damn that Klöden..why he should change a team.
But still if we left for example Astana out..here still few good material who wont let Valverde take the easy win.

Phanekim wrote:
I'm pretty sure we'll have major drama right before the start similar to last year.

Guido Mukk wrote:
Only shure thing is that French teams gonna start..

cmfos wrote:


Yep. I can't see any of the French teams getting banned anytime soon. I think they've all signed the anti-doping charter.

A friend of mine suggested to me that the reason why the French teams don't do so well is because they have more stringent internal anti-doping controls. The riders aren't juiced up but as a result, they can't compete against the teams that cheat. Now, I'm not saying I agree with this because I don't know it for a fact but I'd be curious to hear what the rest of you think about this theory. The last Frenchman to win the Tour was Hinault or Fignon, correct? And that was 20 years ago.

And other circumstantial evidence is that I cannot recall a prominent French rider that has tested positive for drugs in the last few years. Are there any who are implicated in Puerto? What about the Festina scandal in the late 90s? Well, now that I think about it, there was a doping scandal with Cofidis a few years back. So maybe I'm full of s**t.

I also agree with Isso's sentiments about paying for interviews. Basically, if you need to get paid to do an interview like that, then anything you say has to be greeted with immense skepticism. The more sensational you make the story, the more you get paid. I'm not saying that Jorg is lying but it makes me doubt what he says when he's getting big bucks for the interview.

Bavarian wrote:

Btw. bought the Spiegel today and read through the article. It was 14pages and I don't remember half of it. Most important to me is that doping was common and Jaksche said that he didn't even relize that doping is something forbidden. He didn't understand the Festina scandale and asked himself. "Why is everybody furious, I mean everybody has that stuff with theirselves."

Jaksche started Doping under Stanga. Stanga asked Jaksche after a good P-N stage which stuff he took. Jaksche thought it was a joke, but when the doctor came and tested Jaksche's haematocrite which was 41 Stanga said "oh my god we need to give this guy a 5-year contract". Jaksche started with injecting Vitamines then and took EPO for the first time before TdS. He fast got used to doping and saw it just as requirement for fullfilling his job in a better way.

At Telekom he was doped by the Freiburg doctors too. Especially with EPO, as they didn't like the pills and stuff.

At Once according to Jaksche everything was controlled and organized by the team. He just had to give his arm to the doctors and let them set the syringe. He didn't have to care about anything and just had to trust the doctors.

At CSC under Bjaarne Riis, Jaksche worried much about the training controles because EPO was now traceable. Riis knew that Jaksche doped and talked openly about the traing controle problem. Those controles were very seldom and not effective. Jaksche claimed that if the vampires came, he could just have gone to the door phone and tell his brother's name and the vampires would have gone.

Back at Manolo's Jaksche got to know Dr. Fuentes. Saiz didn't even tell the name, he just told Jaksche that a doctor would phone him. On the first meeting with Fuentes Jaksche was shown a "catalogue" of possible doping methods and he was asked how much risk he was willing to take. Jaksche then started with blood doping. This wasn't easy because blood couldn't be used after 4 weeks anymore and he could only give half a litre of blood at once. So they started with a half litre at the first session. 4 weeks later at the 2nd session Jaksche was given back his old half litre and they took 1 new litre from him. So they had 1 litre of new blood, but the rider only lost hal a litre. Jaksche couldn't really get along with this and only used it for the big important races. Fortunately Fuentes soon found a better cooling method which made the blood usable for 10 years, so they could stop the in and out all the time...

It was very important that Fuentes had a huge network of helpers all over Europe. At TdF 2005 when the Tour went through germany, Jaksche had to contact a Doctor near his hometown who belonged to the fuentes network.

Saiz wanted to stop working with Fuentes though because one Liberty rider was caught with a haematocrite over 50. ( Nozal at P-N if I remember right...)

Jaksche argues that the Spanish police did a pretty poor job. They think that Jaksche also has the codename Jorge which isn't true as another rider had Jaksche's number20 before 2005. He also claims that there aren't any video tapes of him. The only proof the Spanish police has was a card from Dr. Merino Batres. Batres a 70 year old helper of Fuentes couldn't remember all the code names and so on, so he had to write it down on a card.

Jaksche also says indirectly that OP is all Vino's fault. Because a very popular new rider at Liberty had a bad spring and this made the sponsor unhappy, because that very popular rider was very expensive. So Saiz needed to find a way out of this misere and therefore he had to contact Fuentes, as the very popular rider and his manager, who has been Jaksche's manager for 5 years too, demanded better medical supply.

All in all nothing very new but some interesting details...