PARIS, France: Italian Marco Pantani and Germany’s Jan Ullrich both used the banned blood-booster erythropoetin (EPO) during the 1998 Tour de France, a French parliamentary commission report said yesterday.
Pantani, who died of a cocaine overdose in 2004, won the controversial race, with Ullrich taking second place.
The report identified a host of other riders who had cheated with EPO, including top sprinters Erik Zabel of Germany and Italian Mario Cipollini.
Others to be named and shamed yesterday were Italians Andrea Tafi, Nicolas Minali, Fabio Sacchi, Spanish world champion Abraham Olano and his compatriots Marcos Serrano and Manuel Beltran, German Jens Heppner and Dutch rider Jeroen Blijlevens.
A trio of French riders were also found to have doped with EPO in the 1998 Tour - Laurent Jalabert, Jacky Durand and Laurent Desbiens, the commission’s report revealed.
Denmark’s Bo Hamburger and American Kevin Livingstone also resorted to the performance enhancer in 1998 and 1999.
The commission, though, found no hard evidence that American Bobby Julich, who was third, also used EPO, as Le Monde newspaper had reported Tuesday.
The findings were based on comparisons made of retrospective testing results from 2004 and a list of samples from the 1998 Tour de France and the 1999 race won by disgraced US rider Lance Armstrong.
Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour wins and banned from cycling for life last year for doping in a scandal that plunged cycling into crisis about the extent of substance abuse among the peloton.
The commission compared the results from the anonymous samples from 2004 to named samples taken from the two Tours under scrutiny.
In May, Jalabert was identified as a doper and he immediately stepped down as a television and radio pundit for this year’s Tour that was won by Chris Froome.
Since then, there has been debate in France about the utility of naming names, with the family of Pantani saying they were against identifying riders.
The professional cyclists’ union the CPA last Friday said that it, too, was opposed to publication.
“Publication of a list amounts... to an accusation of doping without any means of defence,” the union said, arguing that no counter-analysis was possible as the original samples no longer existed.
Pantani, who won both the Tour of Italy and Tour de France in 1998, never tested positive, although he was expelled from the 1999 Giro due to irregular blood levels. AFP
