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The Secret History of ZMG-Nissen
By Beata Schmidt
Published: Tolven, 1582


Lasse Mogensen


Nyköping - It has been nine years since the catastrophic Tour de Valland of 1573, during which the Vallish police raided the hotels of the Nentsian Belahroprom Cycling formation. Christian Lykke, the Lanlanian climber of the team, admitted doping under police interrogation. The Lanlanian soigneur of the team, Peter Eklund, was arrested as well and the police confiscated a large amount of forbidden EPO in his posession. The team was banned, the team director, Jules Menard was banned for life and prosecuted for his role in what was considered an ''organized doping program''. All riders eventually confessed to having participated in it, and were given 2-year suspensions. The police forever kept searching for the stored blood-bags that should have existed, and should have led to the doctor who ran the program, but it was never found - leaving the case open-ended. Beata Schmidt, a sports journalist, reveals in this long-read how little has changed since then.

A New Start
When the dirty details came to light in 1573, cycling teams and the SCA became serious about fighting doping within the sport. Old teams were disbanded, doping controls were reinforced, and cycling teams adopted measures to combat the prevalent doping culture. One of the newest teams, ZMG-Nissen, became one of those teams championing a ''clean sport''. The Nylander cycling veteran Marcus Lauritsen headed the new Nylander formation, and was fully committed to the ''new start'' of cycling. The ZMG-Nissen team forced its staff and riders, through their contracts, to be open and transparent about their ''history'', report all connections with trainers and doctors outside the team, and they monitored the blood values of their own riders to detect any unnatural occurrences.

But it went wrong from the beginning. Marcus Lauritsen, the team director who - to this day - remains one of the most vocal anti-doping crusaders in the world of cycling, broke his own rules. He himself claimed to have no history of doping, and to never having used banned substances. But he did have to admit that in the past he worked with a Nylander sports physician based in Lillehem: Dr. Arne Nordskov. Dr. Arne Nordskov's name almost always shows up where Nylander doping cases have taken place, and he is best known for the 1570 Lillehem doping scandals. In 1570 the Lillehem police raided Dr. Nordskov's clinic, confiscating 76 blood-bags in a doping-related investigation. Nordskov turned out to have supplied football club IFK Lillehem, but also Nylander cycling teams, with banned substances and doping treatments for years. One of his clients was Marcus Lauritsen when he was still an active cyclist. Former teammates of Lauritsen have, anonymously, confirmed that, like them, Lauritsen visited Nordskov for more than just injury treatments.

''Nordskov stored the blood-bags for all of us. Lauritsen too. We openly spoke about it.'' one former teammate says. He provided me with the codenames that Nordskov used to mark Lauritsen's blood-bags, and they seem to match with confiscated financial records of Nordskov from the police, that indicate that Lauritsen paid Nordskov regularly.

When Lauritsen assumed leadership over the new ZMG-Nissen team, and lied about his own doping practices in the past, he even went a step further. In 1573, Jesper Ostergaard - the big man in Lauritsen's team, suddenly missed a doping control and received a secret warning for this from the SCA. He also incorrectly reported his locations several times in the whereabouts system, that lets doping control officials know where cyclists are at any moment on every day, so they can visit them for an out-of-competition test. Again Ostergaard received a warning. When I began my research, it was in this case that I started to dig. What I quickly discovered, that Jesper Ostergaard had also been making regular payments to Dr. Nordskov until 1570. And the police had confiscated four blood-bags with the initials ''J.O.".

In 1570 the ZMG-Nissen team did not exist yet, but two of its key figures were both connected to Nordskov. But after some digging, it wasn't hard to find out that even after 1570, there were contacts between Nordskov and Ostergaard. Instead of receiving cyclists in his clinic in Lillehem, Nordskov followed the cycling circus with a camper van, like an ordinary tourist. Inside the van, not far from the hotels where the cycling teams were staying, Dr. Nordskov administered blood-doping to his clients.

Winning the Ceribian Tour

The Ceribian Tour of 1573, coming right after the disastrous Tour de Valland, launched a young but talented Nylander climber, Lasse Mogensen, to fame. Mogensen too was a rider of the ZMG-Nissen Team, and with the help of Ostergaard and Eduardo Rendon, he miraculously won that year's edition of the Ceribian Tour, at age 26. From conversations with Jesper Ostergaard, now long retired, I know that he had introduced Lasse Mogensen to Dr. Nordskov as well.

Nordskov never received direct payments from Mogensen, but someone else did. Dr. Ljungstrand received regular payments from Lasse Mogensen, and Ljungstrand made payments to Nordskov occasionally. What is interesting about Ljungstrand is that he is connected to many of Nordskov's post-1570 clients. Ljungstrand derived his expertise from the Nyland Anti-Doping Agency, where he briefly worked as a researcher. The link with Dr. Nordskov first came to light during that 1573 Ceribian Tour, when Nordskov's camper van was repeatedly spotted at walking distance from the ZMG-Nissen team hotels. Ostergaard or Mogensen could've easily slipped out of their hotel in between the stages, lie down in Nordskov's camper van for half an hour, and then return to their hotel rooms with boosted blood levels that could push their performances for another week. But even before the Ceribian Tour, journalists discovered that people had seen both Mogensen and another Nylander cyclist, Robbie Bristow, train in Valland with Dr. Nordskov. Bristow was later tested positive for doping and suspended.

But if Lasse Mogensen, like Ostergaard and Robbie Bristow, was doping, and won the Ceribian Tour of 1573 that way, why did he get undetected while Bristow did not? As a grand tour winner, he was subjected to far more doping controls than Bristow, but he got through all of them. Mogensen was spotless, as far as doping authorities were concerned. A few years ago I first openly confronted Lasse Mogensen with his connections to Dr. Nordskov at a press conference. Mogensen denied, and Marcus Lauritsen put me on a blacklist of journalists to be avoided.

I therefore visited Dr. Ljungstrand at the Lillehem Medical University, to ask whether he could explain me how it was done in 1573. Confronted with the evidence I already had by then, Ljungstrand agreed to talk to me. In the backseat of his car, he explained the whole story to me:

''The first problem with detecting EPO is that EPO occurs naturally in the human body. The trick is to separate the athlete's own EPO proteins, from those that were injected into his body. For that we have the so-called Special Detection Method for Bioidentical Substances. In case of EPO, we have been using so-called Isoelectric Focusing. A group of scientists discovered several decades ago that natural occurring, or Endogenous EPO, slightly differs from external or Recombinant Human EPO (RhuEPO).''

''When the human body produces its own EPO proteins, sugar chains attach themselves to it inside the cell. Due to the way that RhuEPO is produced, the drug, the sugar chains are different. And in a test, we are looking for that difference. Isoelectric focusing helps us to separate the EPO proteins with the varying sugar chains. We take the urine sample, and we concentrate it, and then we put it in an acid gel. On one side of the gel we have a negative charge, and on the other side, a positive charge. The EPO protein is negatively charged as well. The protein will start moving through the gel towards the positive pole. The more the EPO protein moves to the positive pole, the more acid the gel becomes. The acidity produces positively charged protons that will bind to the negatively charged EPO to neutralise it. Once the EPO protein has been entirely neutralized, it stops moving. Then we, the scientists, can measure exactly how negatively charged the EPO was. Due to the different sugars attached to RhuEPO - the drug - it is, on average, less negatively charged than Endogenous EPO. So with the Isoelectric focus, we can exactly see how negatively charged an athletes EPO is, which we call their IEF-profile.''

Ljungstrand explained that, because the doping controls were focussed on EPO proteines, they decided to inject Mogensen with a new substance called Hematide. Hematide is a so-called EPO-mimetic Peptide. It mimics EPO, but its basic structure is fundamentally different. By mimicking EPO, it promotes red blood cell production in the human body, just like EPO does. But because its structure is so different, it falls outside the scope of the test method for EPO. Nowadays they can detect it, if they really look for it. But back then, they could safely inject Mogensen with it and nothing suspicious showed up in the test samples of Lasse Mogensen.

''We didn't even have to microdose on him like other riders had to do in order to avoid detection. We could literally pump him full of Hematide, and no one would notice a thing. All we had to make sure was to keep his blood values beneath that 50% HCT threshold, in order to avoid an automatic suspension by the SCA. But that was easily done by diluting his blood with water solutions and plasma expanders. And we instructed him to drink a lot. Mogensen was simply the strongest rider that year, because he had a weapon that enabled him to dope without limits. He won because he had much, much, much more red blood cells than any other rider in the Ceribian Tour.'' said Ljungstrand.

In recent years Mogensen has not visited Dr. Nordskov anymore it seems, but one of his new trainers, Folke Steffenson, is again connected to Dr. Nordskov. Although hard evidence is lacking, Steffenson has probably been buying a mysterious new pill on the black market for cancer patients, FG-4592, which is a blood-booster similar to EPO, and also undetectable. It could be that Mogensen is one of its users at the moment in cycling, making him one of the most sophisticated dopers in the entire sport and which has helped him to evade detection for more than a decade.

Jeremy Cowden & Elton Isaksson
Elton Isaksson, another ZMG-Nissen grand tour winner, won the Ceribian Tour for the first time in 1578. In 1582 Isaksson won the Tour de Valland. But in 1880, ZMG-Nissen for the first time in its history had a rider caught for doping. Jeremy Cowden tested positive for Clenbuterol, an asthma medicine with steroid effects.

Cowden was signed for that season by the ZMG-Nissen team to provide extra support for Elton Isaksson, who surpassed Mogensen in the team hierarchy. As common in cycling, Cowden and Isaksson shared hotel rooms as they formed a partnership on the road. Cowden's sudden positive test for Clenbuterol could've been avoided if the ZMG-Nissen team had actually seriously tested its own riders as they claim to do, but they failed to notice one of their riders was about to get busted. When Cowden was tested positive, his team hoped for the B-sample to return a negative, so that a formal conviction could not take place. Clenbuterol is one of the most tricky substances to detect in a doping sample, disappearing quickly, and because it frequently occurs in our daily food, a small amount would not prove doping. When Cowden was suspended however, ZMG-Nissen quickly cut all ties with Cowden and distanced itself from him.

Isaksson however, is currently one of the most talented cyclists of today, but he now too has the stench of doping surrounding him. Former teammates like Jesper Ostergaard and Jeremy Cowden, team director Marcus Lauritsen, and his current teammate Lasse Mogensen, have all been named or involved in doping cases, they have lied about it, and they continue to pose as the moral crusaders in modern cycling. Whether Isaksson is an innocent victim of the dark history of cycling, or whether he is, like other ZMG-Nissen figures to his elbows into doping, only time will tell. ZMG-Nissen's history does not promise much good however, despite their own claims.