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  Letter From Berlin: Shaken By Doping Scandal, Germany Mourns Death of Fair Play

Letter From Berlin Shaken By Doping Scandal, Germany Mourns Death of Fair Play

By David Crossland in Berlin

Part 2: Real Change Seems Far Off

But so far, despite the tearful confessions, nothing concrete has happened to suggest there will be any real change.

Team T-Mobile, which succeeded Team Telekom in 2004, announced last week it won't fire its sport director Rolf Aldag, even though he was among the six cyclists who had admitted to doping.

Aldag told a news conference last Thursday that he had bought EPO on the Internet. "In 1997, for the first time I began to have a guilty conscience,'' said Aldag. "Of course I feared the side-effects, but I never felt any."

Until last week he had always vehemently denied doping. As recently as January 2007, when he had been asked by Tour magazine if he had ever taken EPO, he said: "Nooo, for God's sake! I wouldn't have been able to sleep soundly ever again. No one contacted me to offer me anything."

Fellow confessor Erik Zabel said he only took EPO for one week in 1996 before abandoning it because of the side-effects. A test for EPO, which boosts oxygen-rich red blood cells to lift stamina, wasn't introduced until 2000. Zabel struggled to hold back tears when he spoke about his son. "I can't keep on lying to my son if I expect him to become a good person. I lied to him and I want to apologise."

Many critics were unimpressed by the tears.

Schenk, the former cycling federation president, told the Stuttgarter Zeitung: "The logic that we need the worst doping offenders to wage war on doping now is pure cynicism."

The confessions didn't amount to any kind of radical turnaround, she said. "Everyone's just trying to save his skin. They only admit everything in tiny slices, and only when there's no alternative."

Peter Danckert, chairman of the German parliament's sports committee, called on Germany's public TV networks, ARD and ZDF, to stop covering sports where doping is known to take place, and said public funding of medical treatment at international events should be cut if there's even a whiff of malpractice hanging over the sport.

Fallen Idol Silent

And what of Jan Ullrich, who was fired by the T-Mobile team on blood doping allegations last July and who quit the sport in February saying allegations against him were wrong?

The fallen star remains steadfastly silent. "We have nothing to say on the matter," said his manager Wolfgang Strohband. "You won't be hearing a denial from me and there's no news conference planned either," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE on Sunday.

The pressure on Ullrich to make a statement is likely to grow by the day. But for the sport of cycling, it won't make a difference whether he speaks or forever holds his tongue.

With reporting by SPIEGEL staff

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