Of course they were saying: No doping! But as a rider, it's difficult to believe that things can really change from one day to the next.

Of course they were saying: No doping! But as a rider, it's difficult to believe that things can really change from one day to the next.

I rubbed the contents of one bag onto my upper arm on the evening of June 7, just before I went to bed. I thought: Well, it can't hurt. I flushed the packaging down the toilet.

It's possible that the name Bettini came up at some point during a conversation with the German Cycling Federation's anti-doping commission, but I certainly didn't claim that he gave me any drugs. They made that up. Bettini warned me: If you said that, then things could get dangerous for you.

I wasn't in a position to defend myself. Sometimes it's a brutal profession. The first thing I thought of at the time was revenge. I have a more levelheaded take on the issue today.

I can count off on one hand the number of times I've used testosterone gel - because it doesn't really do much.

The truth is that things were already going so poorly for me that nothing surprised me anymore. But then the BKA sent 20 agents to search my house.