On the morning of the day that his career fell to ruins, professional cyclist Jan Ullrich once again demonstrated the schizophrenia that has made him infamous. In a newspaper interview, he made it sound like he was a real titan. "No one can touch me," he remarked. "I have nothing to hide."

By Friday morning things were looking very different. Ullrich was thrown off the T-Mobile Tour de France team one day before the start of the world's most famous cycling race. Christian Frommert, spokesman for sponsor T-Mobile, said new information had come to light, and considerable doubts had arisen.

But he also could have simply said: Ullrich lied to T-Mobile, the company that pays him millions, and to the rest of the world.

Ullrich had given his assurance in writing that he had never had anything to do with Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, arrested on May 23 after police discovered large quantities of doping agents and units of stored blood in his laboratory.

In the end, it was Ullrich's signed, three-line declaration against an investigation report as thick as a telephone book. Investigators believe they have sufficient evidence to prove that several of the blood samples confiscated were taken from Ullrich's veins and tampered for later reinjection.

The day before the race began, virtually all of the top contenders were eliminated  from the start of the world's greatest cycling event in Strasbourg. It's a blood doping scandal that has made a farce out of the Tour de France. Indeed, is there anyone left on this planet who still believes competition cycling is a clean sport?

Of course, some riders have spoken out against the latest scandal. "This is a major fire that can't be put out," lamented Germany's Erik Zabel of team Milram. And in his declarations of rage against the fraudsters, Jens Voigt of the CSC racing team like an inquisitor: "Burn them on the stake!" Of course, when he made the remark, he had no idea that his teammate Ivan Basso would be among those suspended on Friday.

Is the Tour de France finished?

This latest manipulation scandal may just be enough to finally and completely discredit the entire sport. It certainly doesn't help that, once again, it was the police rather than the sport's organizers who forced the investigation. Once again it was police, public prosecutors and judges, who did their jobs forcefully and used every law at their disposal in countries like France and Italy. For Spain's Guardia Civil, suspicion that Fuentes had "threatened public health," was enough for a court to permit wiretaps and monitoring of mobile phone text messages for months. Finally, they had collected enough to make the arrest.

The work of the authorities seems more urgent than ever given how cunning and active the network of dopers is, as the Fuentes case shows. Many of the blood samples seized from Fuentes used a double-coding system to conceal their true origins. The samples included numbers that coincided with codenames. No. 1 is named "Hijo Rudicio," or "Rudicio's son." Is it a reference to Jan Ullrich, the protégé of T-Mobile sport director Rudy Pevenage? Investigators are convinced that they have decoded the customer list and successfully matched them up with 58 cyclists from Germany, Italy and Spain.

Blood doping is a classic method that is coming back into vogue. If an especially high number of red blood cells are flowing through an athlete's body -- after altitude training, for example -- up to one liter of blood is drawn. It is then reduced to a concentrate in a centrifuge and stored. Shortly before a competition it is reinjected into an athlete. The effect is that muscles get additional oxygen which rapidly increases their performance ability.

And unlike the blood of others or the hormone erythroproeitin (EPO), doping tests cannot trace blood doping that has been done with an athlete's own blood. Australian scientists have conducted a test that experts think will be trend-setting in the future. But the method, which can detect manipulation by measuring the age of the blood cells has not been officially approved yet.

So long as they didn't fail standard doping tests, athletes have had little to fear up until now. The law usually only envisages punishments for those that deal in or distribute banned substances -- not for the consumers themselves. American Olympic champion Marion Jones, for example, is still allowed to run, uninhibited, despite the fact that deeply incriminating testimony was made about the athlete during the trial of the owners of the US doping kitchen BALCO. "Confessions made outside of the rules of sport," says Heidelberg lawyer Michael Lehner, "seldom lead to anything."

A deadly risk

The biggest risk for athletes who use blood doping up till now has been their own health. The removal, preparation and transfusion of blood is an arduous task. If the blood isn't stored at the right temperature (between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius), it spoils. Spanish cycling profession Jesus Manzano nearly died two years ago after he received a transfusion of between 125 and 175 milliliters of spoiled blood. Looking back, he is certain that, if he had been given any more at the time, "he would have been taken home in a casket." Manzano stopped doping and shared his insider's knowledge and became an important police informant in the investigation targeting Fuentes and his accomplices. During his time as a rider for Kelme, Fuentes had provided medical care for the team.

For T-Mobile and Ullrich, the investigation ends a long marriage that once seemed unfailing. At age 23, Ullrich won the Tour de France donning the Deutsche Telekom jersey, and in subsequent years, he often landed on the podium in Paris as one of the top three finishers in the exclusive cycling race. Even at T-Online headquarters in Bonn, people never gave up hope that Ullrich -– who in recent years has been more than a bit slipshod –- might once again win the race.

At one point, his bosses tried to free him of the stresses of daily life. They created a complex babysitting system for their star -– even dispatching a personal chef to his Black Forest villa. Then, on a night out at the disco, he took a hit of ecstasy. When he was given a random doping test, he was caught like a kid who had run away from boarding school. His response? He acted like pubescent boy who had gotten sick of being mothered to death. He was more or less banished for one year before returning to the Telekom fold. Back to old acquaintances with cozy conditions: a contract for a number of years and pay in the millions.

But more had changed when he returned to Telekom than just the team's name. (T-Mobile is Deutsche Telekom's mobile communications subsidiary.) The company's former communications director, Jürgen Kindervater, who first had the notion to sponsor a cycling team and long served as a sort of father figure to the cyclist, had left the company.

Today, businesslike managers who see the racing stable as an image product have the final word. In an emergency, these managers have no problem taking a rider off the team -- even if the decision comes the day before their most important advertising event. With the prospect of the company's image being tainted by an Ullrich doping scandal, the decision came quickly.