After coming out of nowhere and winning two Tour de France stages, Ricco was tested positive for EPO (erythropoietin), and today has actually admitted to taking the drug to the Italian Olympic Committee’s anti-doping prosecutor.

Ricco, and teammate Leonardo Piepoli were fired by Saunier-Duval due to the scandal, and cheating. Piepoli hasn’t tested positive, but the team let him go out of their distrust of him being clean.

Interestingly, Ricco goes after the poor quality of the testing:

“They made 10 tests in about 13 legs, two were positive and in fact in theory all the tests should have been positive - therefore the method needs to be checked,” he said, admitting he wanted to rid himself of a “huge burden”.

We recently covered a story by the New York Times that had similar concerns about the testing methods not being very successful.

AFP article about Ricco

Ricco Blasts lax tour testing at Sporting Life.