“Stop playing ‘hide and seek’, Riis. Your prolonged strategy of complete silence is beyond embarrassing!”

Danish communications experts Jesper Lynghus and Christian J. Porter-Schultz didn’t exactly mince their words when describing Bjarne Riis’ 5 months long self-imposed silence in the wake of the allegations made public by a former member of Riis’ team CSC, American rider Tyler Hamilton, in the latter’s book “The Secret Race”.
 

According to Jesper Lynghus, Riis’ continued refusal to speak with the media reflects negatively on his team sponsors, and therefore Riis’ sponsors are the only persons who might convince Riis to start communicating with the media.

One of the sponsors, Lars Seier of Saxo Bank, disagrees completely. Wrote Seier on his Facebook-site last Monday, “So BT (a Danish newspaper – ed.) wants us to force Riis to break his silence? Well, they can go f... themselves! We’ll never start acting as errand boys for BT. Besides, there’s nothing new for Riis to comment on. There’s nothing but a series of insignificant and repetitive articles in BT.”
 

Riis was put under additional pressure to comment on the allegations when a Danish TV channel reported that Riis and one of his riders were mentioned by Michael Rasmussen in his testimonies to the Danish anti-doping authorities.

“Whatever happened before we started acting as sponsors is insignificant to us,” explains Kasper Elbjørn, communications director of Saxo Bank, to Danish media Sporten.dk.

“We prefer to look forward rather than look back. Since we started sponsoring Riis and his team back in 2008, Riis has been implementing an anti-doping programme which is the envy of the entire cycling world. We have no reason to suspect Riis of any wrongdoing. The witch hunt has gone too far."

"All these episodes date back 10-15 years. For me it’s very difficult to see how anyone could add anything new to these cases. They contain nothing new and, besides, Riis and his team were the first persons involved with cycling to come clean about the past,” concludes the communications director of Saxo Bank.