[LidlRacer]

Falls es doch noch jemanden interessiert, obwohl die Diskussion hier weitgehend eingeschlafen ist, hier noch ein paar "nette" Details:
Hamilton: Doping hid in plain sight

The evening of the first rest day in the 2004 Tour de France, Hamilton found himself alone in his room in an austere chain hotel outside Limoges, France, after doctors for his Switzerland-based Phonak team had aided him with a transfusion, a by-then routine oxygen-processing boost to help him through the upcoming mountains. [...] Hamilton was shaky with a fever, suffering from a skull-cracking headache and urinating blood -- not a mere rosy tinge of it, but "dark, dark red, almost black'' blood.

He knew exactly why. "I'd transfused a bag full of dead blood cells,'' he writes in the matter-of-fact manner the rest of us might use to describe ingesting a bad oyster. "My body felt toxic ... I got my phone and set it next to me on the bed, in case I had to call for an ambulance.''

Instead, Hamilton took aspirin and drank water and said goodbye to his dog. The next day, he got back on his bike and rode a 100-mile flat stage. "That's the horrible, beautiful thing about bike racing,'' he writes. "You keep going.''

How did he get there in the first place? How did a smart, perceptive, talented athlete make deliberate choice after choice to turn himself into a guinea pig on wheels? [...]

"It all happened so slowly and organically. You start out tiptoeing through a little bit of mud and before you know it, you're up to your neck ...''