without trying to sound like i'm shooting the messenger, i have to say i hate rudy pevenage. i used pray jan would ditch that little svengali parasite. if anyone destroyed jan's career it was that jack@$$.
everything he says, truthful or not, is always self-serving. i wouldn't be a bit surprised if rudy's little "slip" with using his own phone wasn't "accidentally" on purpose, because jan threatened to ditch him or something. nor would i be at all surprised to learn that pevenage was taking money from lance to undermine jan. that at least would explain why he encouraged jan to work with fuentes and not frieburg, given that fuentes's operaton was clearly substandard (he nearly killed manzano afterall), and that, by helping so many, he had too many conflicts of interest and was way too exposed and easy to bribe. (wow, i sound like a pro-doper but i'm not; i was just a huge fan of jan's and after the fuentes affair came to light i never could understand how a doped jan couldn't beat a doped armstrong--that's like a doped secretariat loosing to a doped claimer--it just doesn't make any sense. i've been puzzled about ever since).
that said, given what pevenage said, and given what kevin livingston reported to vaughters, and that telekom/t-mobile was the "graveyard" of rising stars team from at least 1999 to about 2004, i think it is quite possible that the team stopped doping systematically for a while, and left it to the riders until whenever they started the frieburg program, which wasn't until like 2006 or 2007 IIRC--wasn't it response to the fuentes affair in 2006?
ps: dear mr. polish, my reading of what landis has said about lance and epo wasn't that lance stopped using epo but that he took the epo intravenously so that it was undetectable--but maybe i misunderstood that. but even if he did stop using epo, blood packing is still doping and it is still cheating and it is a very effective method of both. don't forget, that just getting caught with his blood in bag in some fridge in spain was enough to end jan's career.
i can't understand why you seem to think that one form of cheating is more noble than another--a cheat is a cheat is a cheat. you have a funny taste in heroes.
BTW--jan was a gifted cyclist since he was about 10 years old; before 1999, lance armstrong couldn't even finish a tour, and it wasn't epo that won that tour for him, though it probably enabled him to maintain his lead once he got it. it was his d*ck move of taking advantage of a major crash in the first week.
the time he gained by taking off and not waiting for everyone, chief among them alex zulle, was almost exactly his margin of victory. i'll never forget the scene--frankie was screaming at lance to wait because that is "how it is done," and lance was screaming "ride, ride, zulle is down, ride."