By Tom Mustroph
Photo: Agence France Presse (File Photo)
“Eufemiano Fuentes used dog names like ‘Birillo’ and ‘Piti’ to archive the blood bags of his clients,” Werner Franke observed wryly. “The Telekom- and T-Mobile doctors applied stickers of cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse to identify the blood they had in storage.”
Franke, Germany’s well-known – and often vilified – anti-doping activist, has recently turned his attention to the activities of former University of Freiburg researchers Lothar Heinrich and Andreas Schmid, who also served as team doctors for the Telekom and T-Mobile teams from 1995 until their dismissal early last year.
Franke, himself a molecular biologist, lets the anger in his voice show when he details the activities of the two now-unemployed sports physicians, suggesting that even the exclusion of Jan Ullrich and Oscar Sevilla from the 2006 Tour de France did nothing to curtail the doping of riders on the team.
While Franke remains an outspoken activist, the two men who are subject of his wrath say ongoing legal issues prevent them from responding. Both Heinrich and Schmid have offered details about doping in the 1990s, but declined to discuss more recent accusations.
Franke said he remains convinced that former T-Mobile rider Patrik Sinkewitz was not the only rider on the squad to be driven from Strasbourg to Freiburg after that year’s first stage to re-infuse a pint of his own blood. Franke said that witness accounts vary as to the precise number of riders who arrived in Freiburg, but insists “at least five and possibly six or all seven riders from the reduced team went to Freiburg that night.”
The distinction is critical for some, including Australian Michael Rogers and Germany’s Andreas Klöden, both of whom have denied involvement with the two Freiburg doctors and say they remained in Strasbourg on the evening in question. Rogers continues to ride with the reorganized T-Mobile team, now Team High Road, and Klöden is a member of the Astana squad, reorganized under the management of former Discovery director Johan Bruyneel.
Franke’s interest is more than academic. The man who heads the research division at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg has recently been appointed to two review committees at the University of Freiburg, where he once taught. The panel is charged with investigating potential ethical and professional breaches committed by Heinrich and Schmid. The other has a more specific task of reviewing alleged doping practices by anyone in the university’s sports department.
Riders had already withdrawn blood earlier in the season, alleges Franke, and bags were categorized – with the aforementioned children’s stickers – and stored in refrigerators in the sports labs of the university.
“All of them were shuttled into a single room in the clinic,” he said. “Records show that it was Schmid who was on duty that night, but there was much more work to be done than that which could be handled by a single person. For each rider the blood bag had to be warmed from 4 degrees Celsius up to body temperature and then the flexible tubes had to be adjusted. It needs more than the one doctor to manage all of that, especially if you have more than one rider to be treated.”
The chairman of both committees on which Franke now serves, attorney Hans Joachim Schäfer, the former president of the court of justice in Reutlingen, said he is less inclined than the activist Franke to reach a conclusion… quite yet.
“We suspect that there were stored blood bags in the clinic, but we have no proof,” he notes.
Schäfer declined to say whether the two doctors’ laboratories even had the necessary equipment to carry out the properly handle transfusions.
“Blood transfusion, if well done, is a complex business, where a peculiar infrastructure is needed,” Schäfer said. “But it’s also possible to do it without extremely expensive or specific equipment. Essentially, you merely have to heat the blood, connect the bags to tubes and a needle and let it run.”
Schäfer is also reviewing records from earlier years, focusing particularly on inconsistent records from 2005, where the panel ran across at least two allegedly faked names in patient documents from that year’s team.
“It should have been cyclists,” says Schäfer, noting that the values associated with the two samples were “near or even over limits” for hematocrit and other measures.
The panel is also reviewing the records of a third suspended doctor from Freiburg, Georg Huber, who provided then amateur riders Jörg Müller and Christian Henn with testosterone in the 1980s. At the same time, Huber launched a study, in which he concluded that testosterone does not enhance performance, but then he continued to supply athletes with the same treatment. Interestingly, Huber was named “sports doctor of the year” in 2005 for work he did with Germany’s anti-doping agency, the NADA.
Huber was extensively involved with German cyclists attending the 2000 Sydney Olympics, at which then Telekom riders, Ullrich, Alexander Vinokourov and Klöden, swept the podium. Huber reportedly arrived in Sydney with a variety of equipment, including blood centrifuges, used to monitor hematocrit levels.
At the moment Schäfer says the panel only has conclusive evidence regarding the transfusion to which Sinkewitz has already admitted. Sinkewitz himself has testified that he was the sole member of his team to make that 2006 trip to Freiburg, an assertion even the cautious judge Schäfer sees as less-than-probable.
Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung recently published a story titled “The Rheine convoy,” in which they alleged the trip to Freiburg involved two cars, one filled with German T-Mobile and the second with the team’s foreign riders. The paper interviewed Franke, but also quoted other – albeit unnamed – sources.
The criminal element
While the university is focusing on potential ethical lapses and making decisions as to whether the dismissals of Heinrich and Schmid should be made permanent, local prosecutors are also examining the case.
A spokesman for Freiburg’s prosecutor’s office said recently that its investigation is based on Sinkewitz’s testimony to anti-doping officials, but an analysis of computers seized from the labs Heinrich and Schmid is likely provide other information.
“It will take some time, because parts of the hard disk were deleted,” noted Wolfgang Maier, “but our experts are working to restore it.”
In October, police seized the computers along with extensive notes from both researchers’ labs. Maier said that depending on the outcome of the investigation, Heinrich and Schmid could face penalties ranging from fines to as many as five years in jail.
Of course the T-Mobile scandal had already resulted in a spate of revelations and ensuing confessions in 2007. Those, coupled with Sinkewitz’s positive test result announced during the Tour, eventually led to the decision by T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, to withdraw entirely from the sport.
A new team?
With the collapse of that sponsorship, the surviving team now operates under the moniker of Team High Road, with American Bob Stapleton at the helm. While the ProTour squad is registered in Germany, it is not widely seen as a national icon, as was Telekom at the height of the team’s domestic popularity in the ’90s.
Stapleton is said to have negotiated a significant payment from Telekom, allowing the sponsor to end its deal two years early. Figures vary, but German media has reported the payment to be in the neighborhood of 25 million euros, although neither side has confirmed or denied that claim. The bottom line is that after more than a year of scandal, the telecommunications firm wanted out and Stapleton said he was ready to chart a new course. The new team is a mix of new and old, with a publicly stated policy committed to the eradication of doping in the sport.
The only remaining rider from the team now the object of the Freiburg investigations is Rogers. Stapleton is giving the former three-time world time trial champion the benefit of the doubt – at least for the moment.
“What we know is that Rogers was part of a very strictly controlled anti-doping program in 2007, and that he has complied entirely with our own anti-doping rules,” Stapleton told Die Welt in November. “Michael has told us he was not involved in the doping practices which Sinkewitz has described. If the facts say otherwise, we will act and take our responsibilities.”
Meanwhile, Franke continues to speak out – some might say shoot from the hip – as the investigation moves forward.
VeloNews editor Charles Pelkey contributed to this report