pralc50 said:To all my friends, fans and teammates. I have been a fraud.
I want to say, have never taken illegal PEDs or been involved in blood doping.
I have always been superior to all those around me. I always felt a need to win
the most demanding bike race in the world – the Tour De France. I needed a strong team around me. Riders like myself, I was always so much better than the riders around me. That destroyed their “mental toughness”, their natural abilities to succeed. You can
look at riders that have since confessed to their own failures. They were too weak on their own and blamed me for their shortcomings.
That is where the fraud began. The Omerta in the Omerta. I injected myself with placebos and told my teammates that I had discovered a miracle drug. I supplied them with the same placebos. This provided them with the confidence they needed. We regularly withdrew blood to make sure all our riders were healthy.
We never re-injected our blood. We provided a saline solution with a dye to look like an infusion. This was once again put of my fraud. I had to instill a belief in my team that we were invincible. It worked; we won 7 tours in a row. But we never doped, unfortunately
when certain members left the team they still felt a need to pursue these miracle drugs. This is where they began their own pursuit of illegal PED and deceiving the cycling fans. When they were caught by a diligent UCI anti-doping program they all pointed back to me. I have to say the only mistake that I made was not confessing to my team mates that I had defrauded them. I have never taken performance enhancing drugs. I have passed over 500 tests. LA
I knew it. Must go retrieve yellow bracelets from septic tank. Must go now. How could I have been so naive....