• This topic has 119 replies, 58 voices, and was last updated 11 years ago by kcr.
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  • How did Lance Armstrong pass his drug tests?
  • ndthornton
    Free Member

    Everyone knows he did it – It wasn’t possible to compete during that time period without cheating. I know this to be the case as a friend of a friend had his sponsorship withdrawn for refusing to dope. But does anyone know the science behind how they got away with it – I’d be intrigued to find out….

    njee20
    Free Member

    So one bent team, which you know about through the grapevine is indicative that 100% of riders were doping? 🙄

    It was certainly fairly endemic, but I don’t think every single rider was doing it.

    How did they get away with it? Easy, be one step ahead of the testing process…

    shindiggy
    Free Member

    He didn’t get away with anything because he didn’t dope?

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    Haze
    Full Member

    By ‘supporting grass roots’?

    theteaboy
    Free Member

    It was certainly fairly endemic, but I don’t think every single rider was doing it.

    Look what happened to Christophe Bassons. Any other clean riders kept very quiet.

    An old link but this is an interesting analysis of epo use, effects and masking:
    http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/features/?id=2006/epo_protease

    FuzzyWuzzy
    Full Member

    Part of the issue is drug testing is very crude and vastly under-funded compared with drug production. If you dose correctly and understand the half-life times of the stuff then you can make a good stab at avoiding detection even with detectable drugs, if you use something cutting edge there won’t even be a test for it so worst case you get a detection via the effects (e.g. hematocrit levels). And then there’s autologous doping (just reinjecting your own blood once the red blood cell count has been increased via a centrifuge), undetectable as well if done properly

    ndthornton
    Free Member

    well I do know from long conversations with the ex rider and not just about his team….

    Also I was after a “scientific” explenation – “be one step ahead of the testing process” – I had worked that bit out myself 🙂

    jfletch
    Free Member

    EPO is only present in urine for a few days but you get the benefits for about 4 weeks.

    There are methods for masking things in your urine. Soap under the finger nails is good one.

    There is currently no test for blood transfusions as long as you use your own blood.

    If all else fails there are always retrospective exemtption letters and bribing the governing bodies.

    phil.w
    Free Member

    Transfusions existed in the 70’s and 80’s, to be supplanted by EPO in the mid 90’s, which was a much simpler procedure. EPO, then undetectable, was curtailed by the 50% hematocrit threshold until a test was developed in 2000, at which time its use began to diminish and blood transfusions reappeared.

    A test for homologous transfusion (using someone else’s blood) was developed in 2004, but autologous transfusion (using one’s own blood) remained largely undetectable until the development of the Athlete Biological Passport in 2008. While many believe that the sport is much cleaner thanks to the Passport program, athletes were in fact engaged in sophisticated measures to mask blood transfusions.

    mtbtomo
    Free Member

    Have you read a book called ‘Breaking the chain’. Its more in the days of Richard Virenque and Festina but its still a good read.

    ndthornton
    Free Member

    It really is bizare the lengths people go to. I heard something about a test for a certain type of hormone that involves measuring levels against a different hormone. The way around this apparantly is to increase both hormones by the same amount!

    ransos
    Free Member

    The answer to the OP is that he didn’t pass all of his drugs tests.

    mk1fan
    Free Member

    Everyone knows he did it

    Bit sweeping that. You may believe it. Some people believe in an afterlife does that make it fact?

    That aside he could have passed the tests by not cheating in the first place. Or had a complete fluid change imediately upon completion of the stage.

    transapp
    Free Member

    I’ve just watched a short clip on the BBC website where it said you could test for own blood doping due to the cell age. Not sure on accuracy though.
    They also went on to say that there was a synthetic drug that increased red blood cell count that was so far untraceable

    DenDennis
    Free Member

    Question.
    IF you’ve had a blood transfusion recently , don’t you have noticeable marks on the arm/body where needles have entered?

    ndthornton
    Free Member

    mk1fan – Sorry Il rephrase – Some people know he did it, some people are not in possession of the facts, some people can’t handle the truth.

    transapp
    Free Member

    Have a look at the little iplayer link on the left hand side, about 3rd of the way down.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/19369375

    I’m not sure that a mark on the arm / body is in itself enough evidence. Also, I think that few people would feel a little upset if at any point a doping person could come up and say “right Mr Armstrong, put down your pint and strip naked. Refusal constitutes guilt and a lifetime ban”

    mk1fan
    Free Member

    Some people aren’t bothered.

    All professional sports men and women dope in some form or another it’s just some forms are touted as ‘wrong’. What’s deemed ‘wrong’ changes year on year.

    What’s more disturbing is people who take the view the someone must be guilty simply because they must be guilty.

    totalshell
    Full Member

    I may be slow but..
    if you dont fail one of hundreds of tests taken at random and at the time and place of choice of the tester then i draw one conclusion.
    At the time of those tests you did not have any of the prohibited drugs etc present.
    I’d also imagine that if you were so good at concealing the use of these substances etc so that you didnt fail any of these random tests, then you had a pretty clued up medical team supporting you and if that were the case why would they be so incompetant at ensuring you passed all the tests and yet your close friends and team mates failed thiers?

    then 5 -10 yrs later facing prosecution these team mates and dr’s cop a deal and agree to give evidence against you to prevent them serving jail time.. thin at best and inadmissable evidence in the UK.

    ransos
    Free Member

    if you dont fail one of hundreds of tests taken at random and at the time and place of choice of the tester then i draw one conclusion.
    At the time of those tests you did not have any of the prohibited drugs etc present.

    Like Marion Jones?

    cynic-al
    Free Member

    We can’t know, but I agree with njee20 – enough money in the sport for it to be ahead of testing.

    davidtaylforth
    Free Member

    He had mates in high places. For what he did for the sport no one was ever going to let him fail a test.

    atlaz
    Free Member

    to prevent them serving jail time

    Nobody is going to jail for this. Well, not unless the US government reopens its already closed case.

    Doug
    Free Member

    I may be slow but..
    if you dont fail one of hundreds of tests taken at random and at the time and place of choice of the tester then i draw one conclusion.
    At the time of those tests you did not have any of the prohibited drugs drugs they can test for at the time etc present.

    ftfy

    globalti
    Free Member

    Part of the issue is drug testing is very crude and vastly under-funded compared with drug production. If you dose correctly and understand the half-life times of the stuff then you can make a good stab at avoiding detection even with detectable drugs, if you use something cutting edge there won’t even be a test for it so worst case you get a detection via the effects (e.g. hematocrit levels). And then there’s autologous doping (just reinjecting your own blood once the red blood cell count has been increased via a centrifuge), undetectable as well if done properly

    This is the closest explanation to the mark.

    Lance is reputed to have an unhealthily close relationship with a certain Dr Ferrari who you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Ferrari

    Wiki says: “On 10 July 2012 the US Anti-Doping Authority issued Ferrari a lifetime sports ban for numerous anti-doping violations including possession, trafficking, administration and assisting doping.”

    I’m not a chemist but I work in the aroma chemicals industry so I have a layman’s understanding of the use of gas chromatography and other related analytical methods. This is a pretty typical gas chromatogram of a complex mixture of molecules:

    Each peak represents a molecule, the vertical axis being an indication of the amount and the horizontal showing the retention time in the column. Gas liquid chromatography is a little like when you did paper chromatography at school; a blob of ink is put on some blotting paper and water or a solvent flows up the paper, separating out the different colour molecules and smearing them up the paper, the smallest moving the furthest though the paper matrix. In GC you put a tiny sample of the mixture (a flavour or perfume or athlete’s urine) into a 35 metre long capillary tube (the column) and you heat it up; the sample evaporates and the smaller more volatile molecules are pushed through and emerge from the end of the column, creating the peaks. From having previously run those single molecules we know how long they need to pass through the column under a given temperature ramp so we know what they are. Obviously this is hugely over-simplified and you need lots of experience to interpret GC because often one peak can hide another and certain compounds will give complex signatures with several peaks – you should see the trace when we get perfumes that have been contaminated with something like mineral oil.

    My understanding – and no doubt some expert will be along soon to correct me – is that if you are at the forefront of molecular chemistry you will know that certain performance-enhancing molecules are masked by the body’s own natural chemical signature and as the post above points out, the agencies who detect drug use will be a decade or so behind the cutting-edge drug manufacturers and so detection methods currently in use will not be able to pick up certain molecules. Molecular analysis is a bit hit-or-miss and you need to use a variety of different techniques together; we are constantly investing in new detection technologies, which enable us to gain a better understanding of what the big aroma molecules manufacturers are doing in the market but it takes out technicians a couple of years of experimentation to learn the best ways of using the new technologies. The latest we have bought is sorbtive bar extraction technology – a very interesting little toy indeed costing around £60,000 extra on top of a standard GC setup.

    Trimix
    Free Member

    Its good to see some proper scientific explanations. I still laugh at the Lance fundamentalist fans though, who seem to be capable of ignoring the bleeding obvious 🙂

    iain65
    Free Member

    If you are interested in understanding, this is probably the best (and very good) read available:

    matt_bl
    Free Member

    Your GC explanation is correct but pretty crude. Modern mass spectroscopic techniques (essentially the detector on the end of the GC) can pick out two different compounds even if they have exactly the same retention time (appear at the same point on the x axis). To do this you do need unique mass fragments from each compound, so if they are very similar in their structure they will be harder to separate.

    To say testing is crude is a little unfair, analytical science is incredibly sophisticated, check out the stable isotope analysis to determine the differences between endogenous and exogenous hormones.

    It becomes very difficult if you don’t know what you are looking for, something of unknown shape and size, in a very huge haystack!

    If you know what you are looking for given enough time and money it will be found.

    Matt

    Saccades
    Free Member

    Add an NMR into the mix and you can identify pretty much any carbon based compound. Which is nice.

    Compared to the 80/90’s, high end sophisticaed analytical instruments are so much cheaper, easier to use and more reliable than ever.

    So the labs will start to catch up with the dopers if there is the time and will to keep searching, however one of the side effects of more reliable/accurate equipment/methods is that the paperwork side has massively escalated. Validation of a new method between the testing labs and then sign off by the regulatory bodies can be massive periods of time. And if it’s not a properly validated and approved method you can bet that a highly paid lawyer will pick holes in it and get the cheat off.

    matt_bl
    Free Member

    I’ll throw into the mix trial and unlicensed drugs. Just getting hold of certified reference standards is almost impossible.

    BristolPablo
    Free Member

    Just with regards to a few of the comments recently about whether its possible to beat a drugs test, ie, be dirty but show up clean, how good the tests are etc, the following is an excerpt from the CAS case aagainst Contador

    CAS report said:
    Following WADA’s request, the Cologne Laboratory reanalysed three other urine samples provided by Mr Contador during the 2010 Tour de France. The bodily samples of 22, 24 and 25 July 2010 showed further clenbuterol concentrations of 16 pg/mL, 7 pg/mL and 17 pg/mL respectively. A blood sample was also taken on Mr Contador on the morning of 21 July 2010. Such blood sample also contained clenbuterol at a concentration of around 1 pg/mL.

    A picogram is one trillionth of a gram or rather 1000000000000pg = 1g but as we all now know, the meat contamination theory was proved to be less likely than doping. In short, IMHO, the men in white coats in laboratories will catch you….

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    Add an NMR into the mix and you can identify pretty much any carbon based compound. Which is nice.

    Usefull though NMR is in a chemistry lab, I can’t see a practical anti-dopeing use for it. Pissing in a jar and putting it in an NMR machine would be like listening to white noise and explaining to someone that somwhere in the randomnes there was Beathoven’s 5th.

    matt_bl
    Free Member

    Very useful for structural elucidation if you have a true unknown but yes absolutely rubbish in the process you describe. To be fair alot of sample prep still goes on before the majority of samples get near an instrument, although Direct Injection is good for organics in clean waters.

    I don’t know if anyone has attached an NMR to the back of a HPLC yet, probably but god knows how?

    Saccades
    Free Member

    thisisnotaspoon – as a stand alone test you are correct but a gc, ms and nmr used in conjuction are going to id any pharmaceutically active compound.

    “I’ll throw into the mix trial and unlicensed drugs. Just getting hold of certified reference standards is almost impossible.”

    2 different things?

    for ors use lcgc, they have all usp/ep for instance, or you can self cert as a seconday reference standard or material which most places have to do for even licensed drugs.

    using gc, ms and nmr you can id a trial/unlicensed product.

    Saccades
    Free Member

    just seperate the solution at the rt of the unknown and nmr that, we often spot it on a tlc plate for futher seperation of closely eluting peaks before scraping the plate and testing to get much higher purities when we investigating unknowns.

    munrobiker
    Free Member

    The obvious answer was that either-

    a) he was very clever
    b) he was very clean

    I like the idea of him being clean. I can see why after 10 years of being constantly harassed, having people show up at his house unannounced to have him piss in a pot and generally being the butt of many needlessly aggressive middle aged men on the internet’s rage he’s had enough and quit.

    I know the majority of you cynical old beggars who are so jaded will disagree with this, but that’s your lot. Go and enjoy being cross at the world.

    crashtestmonkey
    Free Member

    1) you cannot prove a negative, and absence of evidence is not evidence of abscence. I spent years using the worlds most powerful electron microscopes to re-visit problems and questions that had been long standing, every few years technology improves and become more sensitive.
    2) Armstrong helped his cause by pretty much only racing the Tour, so was subjected to less tests than his peers.
    3) he beat by some performance margin a peleton of the worlds best riders, most of whom have subsequently been linked to doping, so either he is truly superhuman, or he doped.
    4) Many cyclists and other athletes have been confirmed as drug cheats without failing a test. Marion Jones already named above, Millar was caught from an empty syringe, Jonathan Vaughters came out after retirement.
    5) LA seems to say everything apart from “I did not take drugs” in his rambling arguments. Its unfair, a witchhunt, he never failed a test (untrue), he is now being judged by different standards to current athletes etc etc means he can rant for pages, without actually denying what is at the core.
    6) If youve read LA confidentiel or From Lance to Landis there are witnesses against LA who were not “tainted fellow riders”.

    It is unlikely given the time lapse there will every be categorical proof he doped; his followers dismiss the retrospectively-tested samples linked to him. His performances were literally incredible.

    Can’t believe SW people still think he’s innocent???? I honestly thought we had more intelligent posters on here? Next some will scream Marion Jones innocence too!

    munrobiker
    Free Member

    I am intelligent enough to not have to use multiple question marks and believe he’s clean. I will believe this until a proper trial with evidence has proven otherwise, which is the mark of a civilised society, no?

    Lol@ the wit

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