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Lance Armstrong and the Science of Drug Testing
Hugh Pickens writes "As the media reports that seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong says he will no longer fight doping charges from the US Anti-Doping Agency, which will strip him of his titles and ban him from competitive cycling for life, Tracee Hamilton writes that the Lance Armstrong vs. USADA fight is a tough one in which to take a side, because to believe USADA means suspending belief in the science of drug testing. 'If you take personalities out of the equation, you're left with pee in a cup and blood in a syringe,' writes Hamilton. 'Armstrong never failed a drug test. He was tested in competition, out of competition. He was tested at the Olympics, at the Tour de France, at dozens if not hundreds of other events. And he never failed a test.' Instead Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of the USADA, gathered a group of people who swear they saw Armstrong doping. 'If the results can be discarded in favor of testimony, then let's go right to the testimony phase and quit horsing around with blood and urine.' There has been no trial, no due process, but in the minds of many, that testimony outweighs the results of hundreds of drug tests. 'I don't know if Armstrong did the things he's accused of doing, and neither do you,' concludes Hamilton adding that it can't work both ways. 'Either a drug test is the standard, or it isn't.'"
are awesome
I don't think anyone has ever believed that passing a drug test mean the person was clean for sure. Why do they store samples for X number of years in order to re-test them in the future, with better technology? It's because if it's found out later that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
If we find out some other way besides a drug test that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
The sworn statements of people caught doping is of virtually no value at all. Once caught they'll swear to any thing you want them to. They are allready proven liars so why even bother with them?
For fuck's sake. You're the Washington Post. Can we not talk like we're five years old? Surely there's some other phrase -- if you think super hard -- than "pee in a cup" that a professional journalist for a big-time publication can use?
From what I've read, this has all the hallmarks of a witch hunt from a bunch of out-of-control bureaucrats. I can't blame Armstrong for giving up. He's been through the grinder.
Ever since Lance won race after race, instead of just considering the victories a success and moving on, the TdF has turned into an international pissing contest, where agencies keep stepping up to challenge Lance Armstrong again and again, they leave empty handed, and another agency steps up to continue it. This verges on just plain malicious persecution. In civil law, this would be vexatious litigation pure and simple.
So, I guess because these "agencies" which have as little to do with the TdF as a high school coach does with the Superbowl can wear someone down until they get tired of it and surrender.
Oh well, the TdF has lost any real relevance in bicycling because a victory by anybody who isn't French can be taken away by volleys of lawsuits and challenges which have nothing to do with hammering up the Alps.
Suppose after you have been to the bar you are pulled over and pass a breathalyser test and the cop sends you on your way. A week later one of your friends gets busted for dui and testifies that you drank too much the previous week causing the loss of your license.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Lance has claimed consistently that he has not doped. Every drug test he's ever taken has come back clean.
Beyond that the people who are testifying against him, were caught doping and were given the deal of "If rat out Lance, you get 6 months, otherwise it's a lifetime suspension."
I agree with the last sentiment of the article. If we're just going to ignore the science and go with what people have said, why even drug test.
I say he's innocent until proven guilty in a court of clear cut science. When one of his many numerous samples finally tests positive for a banned substance, then hang him by his own petard.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
99 tour de france
That was corticosteroid ass-cream for saddle sores that was cleared with TDF before he used it then he tested "positive" for using the cream. Yeah, wow, shocker!
01 tour de suiss
He said, he said, he said? Need some evidence except "whisperings"
USADA is claiming Lance's blood looked to have EPO/blood transfusions in 2009 & 2010
And the evidence is where?? Oh yes, secret, to be revealed. I'll wait for evidence before I would start accusing someone of anything.
Right now this all looks like that JFK assassination conspiracy theory with a grassy knoll and the military industrial complex. Just because someone keeps repeating it, does not make it true.
If UCI and TDF look at the USADA evidence and deem it credible, that would be one thing. But for now, it is USADA vs. UCI. USADA has no jurisdiction to strip him of anything related to TDF. Not without evidence and hand waving jailhouse snitches ain't it.
Frankly, whom are the so called accusers? The dopers like Landis. Reminds me of witch trials.
Anyway, some people like Brunei (Lance's former team coach?) will attempt to go through the "process" and so USADA will need to provide some proof. But if this process is where circumstantial testimony is enough, then sorry, it is stacked.
The problem with drugging in sport is that the teams with the most money hire the pharmacists and doctors (like Fuentes and Ferrari) who develop cutting edge drug regimes which are beyond the current limits of drug testing. Drug testing inevitably develops behind the science of doping - testing for some new substance can only be initiated once it becomes known that that substance is being used for doping, and inevitably there is a lag time during which a reliable and safe test is developed.
Consequently the drug tests cannot be the 'gold standard' for evaluating whether or not someone has doped. Witness testimony is what we rely on in far more serious cases, like murder for example, and it seems perfectly reasonable to assert that if enough credible people are prepared to testify on oath that they personally witnessed Armstrong doping, then he was doping, whatever the drug tests say.
There's circumstantial evidence, too. One thing which had me convinced Armstrong was doping back as early as 2004 were his rages - he was aggressive and prone to anger far outside the normal range of human behaviour. But since then we've seen so many of his team mates and ex-team mates implicated - Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis and several others have been convicted, while George Hincapie agreed to give evidence against Armstrong in return for not being prosecuted. It simply isn't credible that everyone on the team was doping except the strongest, fastest man in the team.
There's some good news in all this. This years leading riders were about 4% down on power output - Lance Armstrong in 2005 was outputting 6.8 watts per kilogram, whereas Bradley Wiggins, this year's winner, was capable of just 6.57. Of course, the fact that power is down - across the whole peloton, not just the leaders - doesn't prove that today's riders are not doping, but clearly something has changed, and dope is one thing that may have changed.
Of course you can argue, and some people have, that if you can't reliably test for dope then the sensible thing to do is to allow all athletes to take whatever drugs they want, because if they're all doping then that's fair. But many of these drugs are dangerous - there were a rash of deaths from heart attacks of very young cyclists in Holland and Belgium in the early 2000s associated with apparent use of EPO, for example - and many athletes are young and under great pressure to succeed. We do have to clean up cycling (and other sports, too, of course, but I'm no expert on other sports) or else we will see a lot more kids with great potential killed to no purpose. I believe that we are succeeding.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
On television tonight, they showed a picture about the 2000 Tour de France (IIRC) with the first ten cyclists.
All of them (if we count Armstong) had been tested positive to one thing or another, so the title would go to the eleventh guy. He's not positive because he probably hasn't been tested as much.
Add to that that if I were to take the same drugs they did, I'd still not be able to compete with them (without doping) by a huge margin.
So regardless of whether he took drugs or not, he still arguably was the best at that time.
'Blood doping', that is, transfusing stored blood during a multi-day race such as leTour, is indeed cheating. It is usually packed cells, and is intended to boost hemoglobin and therefore oxygen carrying capacity. It overcomes your physiology, training, exertion, and recovery characteristics.
Armstrong is reputed to be an exceptional physical specimem. with extraordinary capacity for work. This is what bicyclists train for, to both be able to do the maximum amount of work without injury and with good recovery, to be able to do so on a regular basis, and to recover consistently so they can, in the case of leTour, do it for almost a month.
Over exertion results in damage from lactic acid, which takes more time to recover from than the mere exertion of racing. One of the reasons you will see a rider win a stage, and the next day fall to the back. And Amrstrong is reputed to be able to do more, more consistently, than virtually all other riders.
So other riders, not just because they are competing with Armstrong but also others, will try and gain an advantage in work output and recovery, as those are key to winning leTour. Among the strategies currently in vogue are doping to improve blood characteristics, testosterone enhancements to promote muscle growth and performance, and respiratory enhancements to improve oxygen intake.
I quit racing in the 70s due to my asthma. I would be fighting a constant battle with the testers if I ever got to the level of competition where that was an issue, and i had aspirations to do so. A middle-of-the-pack rider warned me I would be in trouble, and having been diagnosed as an adult would make it worse. today, up to 80% of the riders in UCI events have doctors' notes diagnosign them as asthmatics, and they skirt the dosage limits for Albuterol among other things with a keen eye. Pathetic to think that successful bicycle racers are predisposed to be asthmatics. This sort of manipulation also affects other sports, such as biathalon and other shooting events. Sad, but here we are. ps - I know know I would never have made it in racing, I was young and stupid, but to this day I love climbing a mountain on a bike. The mountain cannot win. It just cannot. If you don't have to rind another 40 miles after, it is just the will to do it.
Armstrong has been accused virtually all of his career of doping, and at this pojtn all we have are other guilty riders testifying that they saw him do so. Not a few of whom think they could be winners if not for Armstrong. And most of which are coerced into testimony.
Bicycling is rife with doping, but the USADA has lost all credibility with this pursuit of Armstrong. They can, with the standards they are usign now, disqualify any rider. They don't need results, only questionable accusations and secret results. A sad end to a brilliant career. You would not want your dog treated like this.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
1) Assume Lance cheated
- How wasn't he caught in the act for so long?
- How can all the technological innovation that went into his cycling be ignored? The wind-tunnel testing, the water-tank-in-frame, the unique bike designs, those all were serious efforts that AFAIK were unique, why spend that effort if you're already doping?
- How were others not able to cheat as well as he did?
- How was he not caught cheating in 2009 when he placed 3rd after not racing for 2 years? Wouldn't he be expected to be a total doper taking a standing that high after being retired for so long?
- How can the fact that he trained for only 1 race each year, the Tour de France, be ignored as explaining his stellar performance? Most other competition would do more racing per year, Lance focused like a laser beam on the Tour de France. How can this not help explain his insane performances?
- Lance packed his team with certifiably world-class climbers to set pace for him and run strategy on the large parts of big climbs. Other squads did not. Can't this help explain it?
2) Assume lance did not cheat
- Why are so many people out to discredit him? How big of an a-hole must Lance be to have this many people willing to take him down by lying?
- Why not fight these charges to the last?
- Why wasn't Lance more open in his Tours? The technology existed during his run to simply put Lance on camera 24-hours-a-day for the world to see he wasn't cheating. Why not do this, especially in 2009 when he took 3rd?
- How was Lance so good at simply laying the hammer down at the ends of big climbing stages? Is he just a freak of nature? Were his teammates really capable of simply relieving all the stress of keeping in the pack long enough for him to go balls out at the end?
- Why were later tests on his samples so dodgy? What was the motivation in even testing them?
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Perhaps Armstrong never did fail a 'drug test' but that does not address what he was doing. The USADA says he was doing blood doping which is basically injecting your own red blood cells back into your body to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood. If you have skilled medical professionals helping you with this, as Armstrong allegedly did, it can be undetectable. The USADA also says Armstrong was using the drug EPO but avoided its detection by using smaller amounts administered intravenously, rather than ingested, so that it did not appear in urine samples. The USADA also says that Armstrong was using testosterone injections. Since testosterone is a naturally-occurring hormone, it is expected to be present in the body. The bottom line is that if you have a sleazy medical team that knows how to beat the tests helping you beat those tests, then to say 'I never failed a test' is...disingenous. Armstrong was busted cold because all of those people helping him were forced to turn against him...and he knew it. That's why he stopped fighting the USADA. If he had not, there would have been hearings and they would have been public and the testimony would have destroyed whatever tiny shred of credibility and respect that Armstrong has remaining to him. Finally, Armstrong DID fail a drug test. According to the USADA website: "Additionally, scientific data showed Mr. Armstrong’s use of blood manipulation including EPO or blood transfusions during Mr. Armstrong’s comeback to cycling in the 2009 Tour de France." By 2009, they had finally figured out what Armstrong was doing and what to test for and they had the deadwood on Armstrong. Armstrong was busted...cold.
You can absolutely detect blood transfusions. You can notice that the blood cells are different ages by more than the normal amount, and you can see that the density of them (per unit of blood) is way out of whack. If you inject soon enough that that doesn't work, you haven't done yourself any good anyway since you don't produce many new blood cells.
AFAIK you can't ingest EPO, it has to be injected. And either way, it'd come out the kidneys. There are tests for recombinant (non-natural) EPO, and he's passed them.
He's down a testicle, and he has approval for testosterone injections to bring him back to baseline.
This seems like a big hatchet-job against him. I don't care much one way or the other for him, but if they're going to negate years of wins and accomplishment because of the word of some people who've been bribed to testify, with reduced-length bans, then drug testing is a waste of time. Which is the point of the article.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
Actually that is the one part that I cannot understand. His name is going to be dragged through the mud and, assuming he is innocent, his is going to be wrongfully accused and convicted in the court of public opinion. I can understand that he feels the USADA is being unjust and not giving him a fair "trial" but, if that is the case, sue them for defamation in court. Then he and they will both have to compete by the legal standard and not by their own made-up rules and those testifying will be doing so under threat of perjury not whatever penalty the USADA can deal out.
This whole thing stinks of an attitude that has been building for years, which is that anyone who is overly successful either cheated or isn't responsible for the success themselves. People who are overly successful have to be torn down somehow so others aren't made to feel like losers.
It starts in the poor performing schools where individuals that do try to succeed are ridiculed and often physically attacked by their "peers".
Then we have a President who openly states that people who are successful are not so through the sweat of their own brow, but due to the collective.
Look at the Chinese Olympic swimmer who was as much accused of cheating when she shattered world records.
It's all a sickness that is taking over where the losers and takers demonize the winners and makers. Instead of trying to emulate their success, they simply pronounce it illegitimate and try to take the success.
And the fact is that the Losers and Takers do or soon will outnumber the winners and makers.