sniper said:
This is twelve years after Ekblom's paper and 12 years after the Germans started doing ozon therapy.
And meanwhile in LA the unpaid amateurs are fooling around with homologous blood transfusions, so what are the odds that the royally paid pros aren't doing something similar, or even more sophisticated.
Time to remind people of the Irish blood doping programme. In the 1960s Shay Elliott - who rode as a domestique for Jacques Anquetil alongside Jean Stablinski - was an occasional visitor to the McQuaid household, as recounted by Pat McQuaid in the Shay Elliott biography, Shay Elliott. In the same way that Eddie Borysewicz learned about blood manipulation through Stablinski and Anquetil, Elliott is clearly the key - the father even - of the Irish blood doping programme (while Elliott did write about doping in one of the British Sundays he never mentioned the use of blood transfusions - a significant omission on his part which makes much sense now we know what we now know). Pat McQuaid himself went on to study Phys Ed where - obviously - he would have familiarised himself with all of the available literature. There is even a possibility that he himself may have contributed some of his own, pseudonymously, his adventures in South Africa demonstrating a fondness for doing things under assumed names. This knowledge was, obviously, used at the various international races the Irish competed at, in particular the Tour of Britain, the Worlds and the Olympics. It, obviously, also, was carried back into the professional peloton by the likes of Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche, Paul Kimmage, Martin Earley and Alan McCormack (coincidentally the five members of the Irish team on the day Stephen Roche won his World Championships - read into that what you will knowing what we know about what is happening in hotel rooms on their eve). Roche himself, he was able to refine his knowledge of the process by direct contact with Anquetil. David Walsh, ghosting Roche's autobiography, The Agony and the Ecstasy: Stephen Roche's World of Cycling (note to coy reference to amphetamines in the title - he really was shameless about these things), writes of the two meeting and of Anquetil advising Roche. Roche also had a particular fondness for Raphaël Géminiani, Anquetil's former mentor, who was his directeur sportif for a time, helping him to pull of that exploit on the Aubisque in 85, for which Roche acknowledges Gém had 'prepared' him fully in advance (we all know that that means all the available doping methods, including transfusions). And, of course, there's Sean Kelly, who unlike Roche was not a super responder to transfusions and invariably had a jour sans in the Tour after receiving one, which was particularly hard on him in 1983 when it cut short his stint in the yellow jersey, a story referred to by Willy Voet in Massacre à la chaîne where he, tellingly, fails to attribute it to a botched blood transfusions (which would have been a criminal offence in France at the time) and painted it more softly, blaming the wrong kind of cortisone. All of this Irish knowledge about blood, of course, culminated in 2007 with the introduction by none other than Pat McQuaid himself - the man who learned it all from Jacques Anquetil via Shay Elliott - of the blood passport, the surest way the UCI could find of legalising available blood manipulation practices without admitting to the world that it was legalising available blood manipulation practices. All of this also explains Sky's interest in David Walsh and Nico Roche: with the ABP in situ they had to wind back the clock to the days of Maître Jacques and so they sought the knowledge Walsh had from Roche and Roche Jnr had from Roche Snr. They would have called on Elliott himself but he blew his brains out with a shotgun won at the Vuelta, probably because of all the EPO he had taken.
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