In a story with the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Linus Gerdemann unveils a unique plan, which he hopes will help clean up the reputation of his sport. Gerdemann, a former Tour de France stage winner and wearer of the Maillot Jaune, hopes to contest the upcoming Tour de France as a completely transparent athlete.
Gerdemann has agreed to total surveillance during the Tour de France, twenty-four hours a day, for three weeks. Gerdemann hopes to refute the continually underlined idea that no one can contest the Tour de France without doping, a painful subject revisited this week by Peter Janssen's new book, Bloedvorn [Blood Form].
The Deutschland Tour winner knows what has to be done to prove his thesis: "Everything must be one hundred percent waterproof. Everything must be intensively planned with anti-doping experts, so that, on serious grounds, we can refute the theory [that one cannot contest the Tour without doping]."
In pursuit of this goal, Gerdemann understands that complete transparency is necessary - transparency that goes well beyond posting testing data. Along with providing public access to all of his testing, Gerdemann is willing to be observed around the clock, all the way down to the time he spends in his own hotel room every night. Not only is he willing to allow observation of his time in the hotel room, he will undergo a body search before entering his hotel room to make it clear that he is not smuggling any kind of prohibited substance into his room.
The plan is an intriguing one, one that hearkens back to current Saxo Bank DS, Bradley McGee's, proposal a few years ago: he invited anyone who wanted to come to his house and watch over everything he did.
Gerdemann is currently looking for an independent partner to work out the details and help finance the audacious project. Gerdemann has invited public television to document his Tour de France and hopefully, once and for all, prove that it can and is done: a clean Tour de France.
The 27-year-old winner of two races so far in 2010 has had an auspicious start to his Giro d'Italia. He finished 7th in yesterday's chaos and now sits in 8th place overall ahead of Wednesday's team time trial.