By David Crossland in Berlin
Bert Dietz, one of the Team Telekom racers who admitted to doping last week, in better days.
Packs of amateur cyclists dressed like the pros in clinging lycra outfits whizzed down country roads. TV channels fought each other for the right to broadcast races live, and the then chief executive of team sponsor Deutsche Telekom AG, Ron Sommer, liked to be photographed alongside Ullrich, a symbol of success, dynamism, true grit, just what Germany needed.
That's all over and has been for a while. Persistent allegations that doping is endemic in professional cycling across Europe have done irreparable damage to the sport. But until now the cyclists, their doctors and trainers maintained a code of silence.
That silence was broken at the end of April by Belgian cycling masseur Jef D'hont, who worked for a host of cycling outfits and spent the years 1992 through 1996 at Team Telekom. In an article published in DER SPIEGEL, he described how doping has been commonplace in the sport for more than 40 years.
His revelations led to last week's avalanche of confessions by six former Team Telekom cyclists and two team doctors. It provoked a moral outcry from politicians, cycling federation chiefs and the media, and has left the country wonder what other sports may be infested with doping.
One Süddeutsche Zeitung commentator drew parallels with recent corruption scandals in German business such as the one that has engulfed Siemens AG, one of Germany's biggest and most venerable companies.
"It's the same with doping as it is with corruption: as long as everyone does it, those who go clean are the losers, while the dirty ones win," the paper wrote.
"The sport has failed dramatically. And nobody should be so naïve amid all the promises of improvement to believe that the sport will change its ways. The Spanish, Italians, and French have already experienced a scandal like that now being experienced by the Germans -- without anything having changed."
It's not just German cycling. The sport is reeling from two major doping scandals involving 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis and Giro d'Italia champion Ivan Basso. Both have deny any wrongdoing.
Rotten to the Core?
The former president of the German Cycling Federation, Sylvia Schenk, said the whole cycling scene was "morally rotten."
Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a strong statement calling for a rigorous investigation. "There has evidently been systematic and continued manipulation of unimaginable proportions in professional cycling," the chancellor said. "The confessions and investigations undertaken so far aren't sufficient to clean the sport up." All "doping sinners" now had the opportunity to come clean and help the sport to start again, she said.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said he was "appalled that there has been lying and deceit on this scale." He said he had set up a task force to check whether taxpayers' money had been misused in the process and would push hard for a rapid passage through parliament of a new anti-doping-law already drafted. The law permits house searches and telephone tapping in doping investigations as well as lenient treatment for people who come forward to testify.
"My big fear is now that the doping revelations won't stay confined to cycling," said Schäuble. A survey by the Forsa institute showed most Germans agree with him, with 59 percent saying they don't think there's a performance sport in which doping doesn't happen.
Deutsche Telekom, 32-percent-owned by the German government, may now come under pressure from Berlin to withdraw its sponsorship of the team following the confessions, business daily Handelsblatt reported last week. It quoted one government official as saying the public relations damage was a "disaster."
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