Champion skier Lindsey Vonn, who is dating Tiger Woods, is said to have turned to notorious drug doctor Bernd Pansold, who spends time in jail for his involvement in doping female German athletes with muscle-building drugs without their knowledge, to help with her fitness.
Each summer, the Austrian energy drink company organizes a rigorous conditioning program for Vonn, lodging her at an opulent resort hotel near Innsbruck and letting her work out at the Red Bull pro soccer team's sparkling training facility near the Salzburg airport.
Then there is Thalgau, a peaceful village on the eastern outskirts of Salzburg, where Red Bull has sent Vonn to its Diagnostics and Training Center, a secure and nondescript old tin-oxide factory that houses a state-of-the-art sports laboratory overseen by the 71-year-old German doctor Pansold.
It is there that America's marquee Olympic star has visited the clinic of the East German doping doctor who played an instrumental role in the German Democratic Republic's notorious, state-sponsored program to dope unwitting young athletes with hardcore anabolic steroids.
Thousands of young athletes were victimized, many suffering ghastly, permanent injuries in what have been described as crimes against humanity.
A New York Daily News investigation of Red Bull's Thalgau operation has uncovered no evidence of doping by Vonn, who has never failed a drug test.
Vonn's publicist initially denied the 28-year-old downhiller worked with Pansold, but later said Vonn has made occasional visits to Thalgau and exchanged "nothing more than a courtesy hello" with Pansold.
At the renovated diagnostic training center facility in March, where Pansold gave an exclusive interview to a Daily News reporter, he said Vonn had visited his facility twice a year in the past.
Other sources close to Vonn said she visited the center for physiological tests, including blood-lactate analysis.
