CYCLING: Derek Scallyin Berlin reports on Deutsche Telekom's threat to pull out of professional cycling

Germany's Deutsche Telekom is considering ending its 16-year sponsorship of professional cycling after two former T-Mobile team members admitted taking performance-enhancing substances during competitions.

Bert Dietz and Christian Henn are the first cyclists from the T- Mobile team to admit the practice, admissions that come a month after serious evidence surfaced that suggested star Jan Ullrich took illegal substances during his career.

A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom suggested yesterday the team is anxious to distance itself from the scandal that has thrown professional cycling in Germany into disrepute.

Particularly damaging are allegations made by Dietz on German television. He said it was an open secret that T-Mobile team members were taking the banned hormone erythropoietin (EPO).

The hormone, which occurs naturally in the body, helps build oxygen-carrying red blood cells and boosts stamina.

"When the doctors were there, they gave us the injections. If not, the massage therapists did," said Dietz.

He said his first contact with EPO was when doctors offered it to him in the training camp on Mallorca in 1995. The doctors didn't force the substance on cyclists, he said.

"But everyone knew, 'if I don't take this now I'll probably have such bad results that my contract won't be extended'."

Team-mate Christian Henn substantiated those claims, admitting he had taken EPO from 1995 until he retired in 1999.

"The (racing) times were such that, realistically, you couldn't have kept up otherwise," he told the Cologne Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper. "You were either top or flop."

Dietz blamed the doping on Deutsche Telekom, saying the company pushed for ever-better performance from the team doctors, Lothar Heinrich and Andreas Schmid. On Tuesday, the pair were suspended from their jobs at a clinic in Freiburg.

A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom confirmed the company was assessing the future of the sponsorship deal, which runs until 2010, but said a premature end should not be seen as an admission of guilt.

"The question is whether you believe that you can make cycling clean - if you don't, you have to draw the consequences," said Stephan Althoff, Deutsche Telekom's head of sport sponsoring, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The T-Mobile team was created in 1991 and scored its first successes with two Tour de France wins by Bjarne Riis in 1996 and again in 1997 with Jan Ullrich, who went on to become the country's most successful cyclist.

He was sacked from the team last year after the entire T-Mobile team was suspended from the Tour de France on foot of a Spanish doping scandal.

Ullrich retired from cycling last February, still protesting his innocence.

The cycling scandal reached Berlin yesterday after government politicians called for far-reaching reforms of the sport, including one suggestion to ban sponsorship entirely.

"The sensational admissions make Jan Ullrich's Tour de France triumph look like a big con job," said Peter Danckert of the Social Democrats.

"If it becomes clear that these wins were fraudulent, they need to be disallowed, including Jan Ullrich's victory."