Five T-Mobile riders resorted to blood doping on the 2006 Tour de France, a newspaper report will charge on Saturday.

According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, the riders made a dash to the Freiburg University Clinic in Germany immediately after the prologue in the French city of Strasbourg.

There, the report alleges, they all received transfusions of their own blood, a practice outlawed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Former T-Mobile cyclist Patrik Sinkewitz, who was convicted of doping with testosterone in July and banned for a year by the German cycling federation (BDR), recently admitted that he had used blood doping and EPO since 2003.

In October, Sinkewitz spent five hours giving evidence to the BDR’s disciplinary committee in a bid to get the expected two-year ban reduced. He was also ordered to pay 40,000 euros ($58,500), which will go towards funding drugs tests.

None of Sinkewitz's testimony involved the restructured T-Mobile team, now dubbed Team High Road and headed by American telecommunications entrepreneur Bob Stapleton. —Agence France Presse contributed to this report.