"You board the plane with a cap on, with your collar up, a secret SIM card and a switched off phone" - Thomas Dekker describes what doping used to be like at his time

Thomas Dekker was a guest on the Clubhuis Team Lucas podcast on Friday. There, they spoke about the doping story of the now 39-year-old Dutchman, who won the Tirreno-Adriatico in 2006 and how doping completely changed his life as a rider.

How did a 'blood transaction' work? "Three to four weeks before I rode the Tirreno, I gave a bag of blood for the first time. Your body will then produce new blood cells and then four to five days before the start I flew to Madrid and got that bag of blood back. It is of course all quite exciting when you board the plane with a cap on, with your collar up, a secret SIM card and a switched off phone. For the rest, I only had cash to pay and I had to make do with a Spaniard who couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak Spanish."

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"Afterwards I won that Tirreno, after having to ride very carefully all week, which takes quite a lot of energy. It was cold all week and I had Oscar Freire, Juan Antonio Flecha and Michael Boogerd as teammates. All excellent riders and I remember sitting there on the edge of my bed as a 21-year-old rider and wondering whether this would be the case for the next ten to fifteen years. Then tears flowed down my cheeks."

"It is very tight-lipped, dangerous and in some countries even prohibited by law, and we are not even talking about your health. The fact that you take blood out of your body, write a number on it and then eventually get that blood back and if it's wrong, it might mean the end of your life. You don't think about that at that moment."

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