Danish report concludes Bjarne Riis was aware of doping on his team and didn’t intervene

A report released on Tuesday by Denmark's anti-doping agency, Anti-Doping Denmark (ADD), has concluded that Bjarne Riis "had knowledge" that riders on his team were using performance enhancers but failed to act, reports The Guardian.

"Management, with Bjarne Riis in overall charge, has at a minimum had knowledge of doping within the team, but failed to intervene," said ADD director Michael Ask, referring to what was then known as Team CSC. Ask described this as ‘totally unacceptable’.

In 2007, Riis admitted that he had been doping when he won the 1996 Tour de France. He was stripped of the title by organisers ASO, but subsequently reinstated. He took over what was to become Team CSC in 1999 and later sold it to Russian businessman Oleg Tinkov in 2013. He remained as team manager but departed what was by now Tinkoff-Saxo in March of this year ‘by mutual consent’.

The report says that Riis gave Tyler Hamilton the telephone number of Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, telling him: “Fuentes is the best in the business, with blood doping he is the doctor to go to.” It also says that he asked Danish rider Bo Hamburger to acquire EPO for his German team-mate Jorg Jaksche. While Jaksche confirmed this story, Riis denied it.

Thelocal.dk reports how four-time Danish National Road Race winner, Nicki Sorensen, pre-empted the report by admitting to using performance-enhancing drugs the day before it was released.

"I have doped, I have fully admitted that. I'm sorry for that and I wish I had done differently," he told Danish tabloid BT. “It happened in the early years of my career, more than ten years back. It was my own decision to do it.”

Sorensen is currently a sports director at Tinkoff-Saxo who on Monday released a statement responding to the news. The team says the rider informed management of his doping past when he spoke to ADD in 2013, emphasising that the matters were related to before 2004.

“Tinkoff-Saxo has a deep-rooted anti-doping culture that is implemented throughout the entire team. Tinkoff-Saxo was convinced at the time and remains of the view that Sorensen has conducted himself fully in accordance with this culture over the past decade of working with the team.”

Sorensen was one of a number of people to speak to ADD. The report was based on 50 interviews with riders, including Michael Rasmussen, who in 2013 admitted to using banned drugs between 1998 and 2010.

The Telegraph reports that Rasmussen was interviewed for two days in 2013 and said he "experienced a widespread use of banned cortisone" at CSC and that management and doctors accepted this. Tyler Hamilton said that CSC doctors would give riders cortisone without medical justification.

Morten Molholm Hansen, head of Denmark's Sports Confederation said ADD could have pressed charges against Riis – as well as against senior Team CSC members Johnny Weltz and Alex Pedersen – except that the 10-year limit on doping cases meant they were out of date.