It has been almost two years since criminal investigators uncovered a blood doping network around Erfurt sports physician Mark Schmidt in "Operation Bloodletting." It was uncovered on the sidelines of the Nordic Ski World Championships in Seefeld, and when investigators subsequently set about questioning witnesses and defendants, they also produced a few photos during the interrogations.
The point of the exercise: to learn whether any of the people pictured might also be part of the network. The photo collection comprised 30 to 40 pictures, and surprisingly, two very prominent names were sometimes among them - namely two of the best cyclists in the world.
One was Primoz Roglic, the Slovenian who only lost the overall victory in the Tour de France to his compatriot Tadej Pogacar in the final meters last summer, and who shortly thereafter won the Tour of Spain for the second time. The other was Dutchman Tom Dumoulin, most recently one of Roglic's noble helpers with Team Jumbo-Visma and somewhat surprising winner of the Giro d'Italia in 2017.
Erfurt sports doctor Mark Schmidt faces up to five and a half years in prison. In the case of a co-defendant, the matter has so far proved even more difficult. By Johannes Knuth
So what is behind all this? So far, there is no concrete evidence that either belonged to Schmidt's network or was guilty of any other doping offense. The public prosecutor's office in Innsbruck, which is responsible for "Operation Bloodletting" on the Austrian side, says on request that the riders are "neither listed as defendants nor as witnesses" in the investigation. Team Jumbo has this to say: Neither Dumoulin nor Roglic had ever had any contact with Schmidt or any other accused person in his entourage, nor had either the riders or the team been contacted by any investigating authority. At the same time, however, it is quite interesting that and how two of the world's best pedalers could appear in this collection of photos at all.
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The criminal investigators won't explain how they compiled their database. "Information on whether or why which questions were asked during interrogations in the preliminary proceedings" cannot be given, they say. However, some pieces of the puzzle can be found in the various Austrian proceedings against individual Schmidt clients and in the 22 days of proceedings in Schmidt's case before the Munich Regional Court. An essential one might be an admission of the former Austrian cyclist Georg Preidler.
The 30-year-old was for many years one of the silent forces in the peloton, first with the German-licensed team Subweb (from January Team DSM), then with the French team Groupama-FDJ with its figurehead Thibaut Pinot. Preidler was among those athletes who confessed of their own accord in spring 2019 that they had used Schmidt's bloody service; according to Preidler, however, he had only been a customer in the 2018 season. The Innsbruck Regional Court has since sentenced him to a twelve-month suspended sentence. In this context, he made a handwritten confession: "This is the complete truth about practices in top-level sport," it begins, "taught to me by shady characters I should never have met."
In it, Preidler also recounted an incident from 2017, when he was still riding for Sunweb, like Dumoulin. At the time, the team's top riders had gone to high-altitude training camps in the spring; Preidler had also wanted to go, and had even been willing to do so at his own expense. But his team had vehemently denied it. The spurned rider was very surprised about this - and about the fact that the riders involved had slipped into incredibly formidable shape after the high-altitude training camp. Dumoulin won the overall at the Tour of Italy shortly thereafter.
Primoz Roglic also aroused Preidler's amazement: Schmidt had filtered blood bags in a Slovenian blood bank in 2018, the confession says, and that's when it occurred to him, Preidler, how fast some Slovenian cyclists had become so good. "I never understood how you can go from being a ski jumper to winning a three-week Tour," he held - a reference to Roglic's amazing biography in recent years. Behind that, however, the term "conjecture" was noted in parentheses.
Preidler would not comment additionally when asked. However, he advised that there could be other interesting interlocutors in the bloodletting context in Germany. Mark Schmidt, the Erfurt sports doctor, had recently affirmed that he had no further clients than those he had already mentioned.
The Sunweb/DSM team, Preidler's employer until 2017, said on request that it had not been contacted by the investigating authorities at any time. And as far as the high-altitude training camp is concerned, "The biggest priority for Georg at the time was that he focus on the team's goals," the rehearsal of tactical elements, for example, or the cooperation with the coaches outside of the races. At the time, the team management considered that more sensible than an altitude camp. In fact, Sunweb has earned a reputation in recent years for providing its riders with very individual and close-knit instruction, not always to the liking of the riders themselves.
On the other hand, Preidler's statements may not have been the only decisive factor in this context. Those involved in the trial say that the photos of some of the athletes were already shown before any clues were given in any of the interrogations.
So the question remains why Dumoulin and Roglic slipped into the photo database. This is by no means the only unsolved mystery of "Operation Bloodletting.
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C bien lors de ces "fameux" stages que les GT se gagnent. L'UCI le sait, les contrôleurs aussi, mais que peuvent-ils faire, à partir du moment ou les contrôles réalisés lors de ces stages (lorsqu'il y en a, ce qui est trés rare) ne comptent pas dans le cadre du passeport biologique ??? Les coureurs et les dirigeants des équipes le savent et en profitent en toute sérénité. Les grands coureurs et les grandes formations débarquent les "poches" pleines et prêtes à servir aux moments décisifs. Y a des fois ou ça se voit un peu trop, par contre (Pogacar dans PDBF chrono, Froome vers Zoncolan et Bardonnechia, Quintana vers Portet, etc).
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