Sunday, July 30, 2006

Floyd doping?

I heard on WJR this morning that no testosterone doping allegation has ever held up when taken to the sports "court" that decides these matters. This could be the first one, but that's not likely.

From what I understand, the current testing for testosterone is flawed. It tends to produce falst positives and with the reduction of the tolerance is going to produce more false positives than the old standard used to.

This article was helpful:
Inferences about Testosterone
Abuse among Athletes


I found it through this post. (referenced in my previous post.)

I cannot imagine why Floyd would dope with testosterone in these circumstances. I've read that it aids recovery, that makes sense considering what happened in stage 16, but the typical application would be for strength bulding during training, not for race day. Could he have had so much recovery benefit that he could ride away from all the others by 6.5 minutes? Also, if you do take testosterone using a patch, it leaves your system within 40 minutes to an hour so it would be gone from his system after riding for four or five hours like they did in Stage 17.

In addtion to all of this, I understand Floyd's actual testosterone level tested quite low. That it was only high in proportion to the epitestosterone level. It seems that the way they are measuring testosterone doping needs some significant improvement. At least, that's what I've read.

I'll be quite interested to see how this plays out.

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