A Sport-Historic Moment?
May 24th, 2007 by philipp
In the last minutes I watched a press conference in the ARD with Rolf Aldag and Eric Zabel, both former cycling professionals for the German Team Telekom/Team T-Mobile. Both admitted having used epo in their career. Rolf Aldag, now sports manager of Team T-Mobile, admitted having used doping since 1995. Eric Zabel confessed having used doping for about one week at the Tour de France in 1996. Zabel states having stopped doping after this one week because of side effects he experienced using epo. Their motivation for admitting doping seems to be the will of renewing cycling and creating tournaments free of doping. Talking with tears in his eyes Zabel said he can’t lie to his son anymore who is probably going to become a cycling professional, too. Zabel therefore doesn”t want him and other youths to grow up with the image in their heads that doping is tolerated by the cycling community.
Aldag and Zabel are the fourth and fifth former cycling professionals of Team Telekom after Bert Dietz, Christian Henn and Udo Bölts who confessed having used epo in the recent days. Together they had formed the successful Team Telekom which dominated the Tour de France in 1996-1997. Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich who won the Tour de France in these years never confessed having used epo or other doping materials. Ulrich is accused of having used blood doping.
In these days more and more information about doped cycling professionals become public. Experts assume exhaustive doping throughout the whole cycling scene. The main problem seems to be that present doping methods can’t be reliably proved. After the big scandal last year, when Floyd Landis won the Tour de France using doping, there is much doubt in the professionals” testimonies pretending to be clean. Let’s hope that the recent confessions help to change something and that the suggestion made by an ARD expert is true:
“This could be a sport-historic moment.”
I think nearly all of the cyclist who were winning are doped…
I tend to agree. It’s sad, but it seems as if it is true. I begin to doubt that there already is a new generation of cyclists who are clean. But who knows? It will be interesting to see how big the interest in the Tour de France 07 will be…