Vonn, the clean-cut face of the U.S. Winter Olympics team and an athlete representing Red Bull — the sugary energy drink that has paid her to promote the popular picker-upper since 2005. Each summer the Austrian 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 state-of-the-art training facility near the Salzburg airport.
That is the location of 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 top sports laboratory overseen by Pansold.
It is here where Vonn visited the clinic of the controversial doctor, said the report.
A Daily News investigation of Red Bull’s Thalgau operation has uncovered no evidence of doping by Vonn, who has never failed a drug test. But the mere fact of Vonn’s and Pansold’s mutual access shows how vulnerable today’s Olympic athletes are when the corporate sponsors supplying their income are accountable only to the bottom line.
