Sports Doping
purepedantry | August 11, 2008A Spanish cyclist, Maria Isabel Moreno, became the first person at the Beijing Olympics to test positive for a banned substance. It's cycling, so no shocker that the banned substance was Epo. No word on whether it is the new type of Epo called CERA that Riccardo Ricco tested positive for in the Tour de France.
Anyway, I wrote a big post on Epo that has all I want to say on the matter.
purepedantry | July 28, 2008Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France yesterday, but the whole race has been marred by incidents of sports doping. First, Riccardo Ricco was caught using a form of Epo called CERA. Now another biker named Dmitriy Fofonov tested positive for a drug called heptaminol.
Heptaminol made me raise an eyebrow, primarily because I had never heard of it before. I am beginning to wonder where these bikers even find this stuff. I kid you not: it took me a while to even find information on it. Most drug databases I checked don't even have an entry for it.
It is on the list of WADA prohibited…
purepedantry | July 24, 2008People have been asking me about Riccardo Ricco, the Italian cyclist who was thrown out of the Tour de France for testing positive for the hormone erythropoietin (Epo), so I want to do a little Q&A about Epo detection and abuse.
What is Epo?
Epo is a hormone released mostly by the kidney that regulates red blood cell (RBC) number. Cells in the kidney respond to hypoxia by releasing Epo into the blood stream. Epo then goes to stem cells in your bone marrow that produce RBCs and increases their production. The appeal to use Epo from the point of view of a cyclist is that in raising…
purepedantry | May 1, 2008After the whole Floyd Landis thing, I wrote a long post about the science of detecting steroid abuse. The primary test uses something called the T/E ratio to determine whether the athlete has injected steroids. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has a maximum T/E ratio of 4. If an athlete gets greater than four on any test, an investigation gets started.
However, researchers in Sweden have just published a paper suggesting that this test has a possibly fatal flaw.
Schulze et al. show that a gene variant present with alarming frequency in the population allows individuals to inject…
purepedantry | August 1, 2006As some of you may have noticed, I have been keeping up with the science of Floyd Landis's failed drug test in a rather long post here.
In the post, I mentioned that there is another test besides the Testosterone to Epitestosterone ratio (the test he already failed) that they can use to check whether the testosterone is synthetic or not. This test exploits the difference in the carbon isotopes in synthetic as opposed to natural testosterone (there is an explanation of that in the earlier post).
Anyway, it turns out my man Floyd is busted -- he failed the isotope test:
Tests performed on…
purepedantry | July 27, 2006Floyd Landis, most recent winner of the Tour de France, has tested positive for testosterone use:
Landis denied cheating and said he has no idea what may have caused his positive test for high testosterone following the Tour's 17th stage, where he made his comeback charge last week. But he aims to find out.
"All I'm asking for," he said Thursday via teleconference, "is that I be given a chance to prove I'm innocent. Cycling has a traditional way of trying people in the court of public opinion before they get a chance to do anything else."
Now the cycling world will wait for results from a…