Hora – yes. Look at Alain Baxter. Lost his Olympic medal for an obvious simple error. He used Vicks. Uk vicks contains nothing banned, US does – one sniff and he lost his medal.

for inadvertant use you get a shorter ban

anyone got some US vicks?

You push your bike up hills. Need I say more?

So would you if they actually had hills in that there London

Adam.. Discussion usually involve people with knowledge and the ability to make arguments that are actually either factually correct or logical. Yours had neither attribute did it? Yes I really do have a lot to learn about discussions from you. Perhaps you could print something on this?
Your jokey putdown is in seriously poor taste and to defend it is really surprising IMHO. I think if you said this to someones partner /mother/daughter in public [ you said you would say it to their face]I suspect people won’t be having a quick chortle at your rapier like wit.

Not read through all the posts so apologies if this has already been covered, Alberto has put his +ve test down to food contamination, how would he know this, and how could he pinpoint what meal caused it?

I’ve developed HPLC cleaning methods for API’s and the result that they are getting (if my maths is right) is 3 orders of magnitude (2 if we used a larger injection volume) below the range we would be looking at for direct injection.

Quantitation of 5 pg/ml in plasma is possible these days, pointless speculating without knowing more about their methodology though.

how would he know this, and how could he pinpoint what meal caused it?

These guys live a very controlled and recorded life. That meat would be the only thing not ‘normal’ the day before the +ve, compared to his diet for the rest of the three weeks.

Lame excuse really.

Proper excuses:

Frank Van den Broucke – it was for my dog.

Yvonne Kraft – I was giving my granny her medication and must have inhaled some by accident.

P.S Haven’t both Schleck bros served a ban for doping ??

hels – Not that I can find out about it. Frank was implicated in something in 2008 but seems to have been cleared. There’s a lot of talk but which top pro road cyclist doesn’t have people talk about them doping?

P.S Haven’t both Schleck bros served a ban for doping ??

No. There were allegations that the elder one Frank was involved in Operation Puerto and it’s known that he was at one point connected with the good Dr Fuentes but nothing ever stuck and he was formally cleared of all allegations (he was never charged with anything).

Although their team manager is Bjarne Riis, a known doper during his career including when he won the Tour.

And the manager of the new team they’ve started is also a known doper.

Look at Alain Baxter

I know there is the miriad of arguments that a doper can be clever enough to fake accidental ingestion etc however if you really are innocent that is **** up isn’t it?

I know it could be argued knowing or not that you will have even a small (TINY in his case probably with that product!) advantage over the other athletes but what if it coincided with the best form of your life?

**** up on that count.

It seems as though doping is the norm in pro cycling, I think we should just accept it, maybe relax the testing, or allow a bit of leeway in the % of amounts found, that way we can just enjoy the racing.

Some of you seem to have ignored the fact that the amount of illegal substance found in Contadors sample would not be enough for him to have gained an advantage, or have been worth ingesting for any performance reason.
Its all very strange. Why would the worlds best stage racer take such a risk and ingest something that will get him banned , if it would have not benefited his performance?

Junkyard
…rapier like wit…

I see what you did there 🙂

It seems as though doping is the norm in pro cycling, I think we should just accept it, maybe relax the testing, or allow a bit of leeway in the % of amounts found, that way we can just enjoy the racing.

hmm, takes the shine off the racing for me though. cycling becomes an arms race, like F1 is now. it really is simple, no leeway.

I do appreciate how hard it must be to avoid accidental doping, but ffs they are pros, it’s their job to know this stuff.

contamiinated food? entirely possible, but I thought that during the tour they had a fairly strict diet where they brought in all their own food?

having said all that, it does seem to be a guilty till proven innocent culture in cycling because everyone automatically expects you to dope.

deadlydarcy – Member
I see what you did there

What, missed the hyphen out? Common error of the uneducated classes. 🙄

Not read through all the posts so apologies if this has already been covered, Alberto has put his +ve test down to food contamination, how would he know this, and how could he pinpoint what meal caused it?

Its probably less ‘what meal’, than ‘a meal’ – as per my original post on page 1.

If he is 100% certain he hasn’t dope’d then it must have come through a meal/drink.

Maybe I’m a little biased, I don’t think he’s done anything wrong. Trace elements from antibiotics can be found in milk, so why is it impossible for elements to be carried in the food?
Amounts so small that they couldn’t be considered performance enhancing, don’t stand near me when I’ve got the ventolin out, you might just inhale some.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Spanish farmers are pumping their cattle full of whatever’s good for them…

For me Contador is a sencere and honest guy, if he’s made the announcement it’s because he believes he’s innocent and is helping the authorities. If he gets a ban he’ll be distraught. Not like other pro dopers riders who simply accept the punishment, they know they’ve done wrong, have been caught and take it on the chin.

Suerte Alberto.

If this stuff is out of the system in 24-36 hours, how was it in the cow still when it was killed? Are farmers that daft that they think they’ll get a growth spurt (or whatever you feed it to cows for) in the last day of a cow’s life? I know there are physiological differences between cows and people BTW.

If this stuff is out of the system in 24-36 hours, how was it in the cow still when it was killed? Are farmers that daft that they think they’ll get a growth spurt (or whatever you feed it to cows for) in the last day of a cow’s life? I know there are physiological differences between cows and people BTW.

if you’d been fed something every day of your life…

Suerte Alberto.

….sauté Alberto surely?

Have a quick read of this atlaz. Veal/withdrawal/consumers.Not sure what you are referencing from, but this was the first listing on Google for me. 😀

….sauté Alberto surely?

No, definately suerte. 😉

thought you had stopped the insults Adam? Given your first post you are in NO position to talk about education are you 🙄
DD it went right over his head why did you let the cat out ?

There’s an interesting Inner Ring post on WADA rules – which I think I agree with. Even if it is proven to be contaminated meat (which seems unlikley to me as no other astana riders tested positive for it), he still gets stripped of his results and a ban, which he can seek to reduce.

You can’t have half measures with stuff like this, there is either a banned substance present in their sample or there isn’t – it doesn’t matter how it got there or how much of it there is.

I don’t think he’ll burn for this though – the ASO like him so will try to protect him.

donsimon – I can’t be arsed to read the lot of it. What does it tell me other than cows are different to people? Oh, and that it seems feeding CB to cattle is not good for them or us. Surely it’s banned which means that Alberto was astoundingly unlucky for the team to buy beef from the wrong people. In terms of the rest of the team, I thought only Vinokourov was tested and conveniently had eaten the hotel’s beef and therefore didn’t eat the doped cow.

Well if you can’t be bothered reading and educating yourself, I can’t be ar5ed wasting more time with your uneducated opinions.

Well I have a day job to do and reading pages and pages of scientific paper to find out a fact that I’ll have little use for beyond a bike forum thread (even if I do understand it), seems a bit of a waste of my time. Maybe if YOU understand it you’d care to explain what it’s actually telling us. Or not.

donSimon – Cows dosed at 10 mcg per kg – “roidshop” suggests Average Dose: Men 100-140 mcg/day, or maybe 1mcg/kg for a bodybuilder (I dunno, maybe less for this purported usage ?)

I do like the idea of blood-doping being involved – maybe it gets into blood cells & then leaches out during storage or something, or the levels were undetectable by ACs doctor and assumed to be nil ?

pjt201 – well thats the end of Homeopathy for cyclists then….

sauté Alberto

😆
a joke?
from hora?!

hels – Member
pjt201 – well thats the end of Homeopathy for cyclists then….

Well, seeing as I’ve yet to see any scientific evidence that homeopathy is anything other than a placebo I’m not too concerned. Also I haven’t seen a homeopathic remedy containing EPO or HGH yet!

EDIT – Oh and the likelihood of any homeopathic remedy containing even a single molecule of the “active” ingredient is so minute it wouldn’t matter anyway – not sure they can test for water “memory” yet…

The article may support Alberto’s story of contaminated cattle carrying the clembuterol from animal to man. As the meat was bought in Spain and outside the regular team supply source and probably not checked. His argument/excuse is therefore feasible. I’m not saying this is fact, just feasible.

The dosage required to induce these anabolic effects
in the metabolism of livestock is 5 to 10 times higher
than those dosages used for therapeutic treatments of
bronchial diseases (Miller et al., 1988). Such a use of
clenbuterol in veal calves led to residue accumulation
in all tissues great enough to have potential pharmacological
effects on consumers if no withdrawal
period was observed (Meyer and Rinke, 1991). We
report here on the results of studies with a moderately
long-term, orally administered @-agonist, clenbuterol,
concerning effects on lipid metabolism, milk production,
pharmacokinetics, and residues in cows.

I can’t be bothered reading Miller et al., 1988 or Meyer and Rinke, 1991 as I’m too busy posting on other threads, draw your own conclusions. 😀

don – typed an edit/addition to what I wrote above but timed-out

agreed, if a cow was fed doses that big you might well generate reservoirs in tissue & fat. then again, if I was a farmer and knew it would be there,I wouldn’t waste further expensive doses once the time for slaughter approached (presumably the drug already on board would be still exerting effects, plus I also don’t want to get caught using naughty drugs or I might get a ban from competitive farming 😉 )

I still like the blood-doping idea as a possible – maybe ACs a truly guilty rider’s docs would assume it was gone because they didn’t know that labs could get as low as 400x below “the limit”. I guess their own analytical equipment (if they had it at all) wouldn’t be state of the art ?

Those are the doses required in livestock to be of any benefit in growth levels and it does say that the residual levels are only evident without a weaning off period. In commercial farming a mistake? lazy?

I’m not sure the offenders equipment wouldn’t be state of the art. Aren’t security firms always playing catch up with the crims?
Also the lack of negative samples on the days preceding the negative test would suggest that there was nothing present in the blood prior to the negative test. The Clembuterol was introduced after the previous test. To risk introducing a drug which is very easily traced during one of the most tested sporting events does strike me as a little odd. Even as a short term benefit a half life of up to 36hrs doesn’t seem logical as it would be present during testing periods and the possibility of being tested is high…

“To risk introducing a drug which is very easily traced”

clearly, yeah, but what if your own equipment says “undetectable” when harvesting the blood and you didn’t know the lab had a new process (as with synthetic epo, for example)

(I’m sure their expertise in the actual doping & physiology is ahead of the labs ability to test – after all the labs have to be reactive to what new things these people start to use – but not sure their equipment would be)

Fair enough, that’s a possibility.
I’m trying to look on the bright side, I think I’ll be quite disillusioned if he’s guilty. The little I know of him, he’s an enthusiastic cyclist, he’s a winner, he works hard and IMO is honest.
I know cyclists who are guilty, and now serving bans, cyclists who were accused but never found guilty and clean cyclists. I know it’s not science, but I think you can get a feeling from the way a person is which camp they fall in, and for me Alberto is not guilty.

I also I know a lot of young and aspiring cyclists who look upon people like Alberto as heroes.

I have also seen the money side of cycling and am not so stupid not to realise that there is a huge amount of money and pressure to make that money.

suggestion to sort out doping in sport- harsh but fair

lifetime ban

stripped of all career titles

repay career earnings including to sponsors.

i don’t buy this i took it by accident mullarkey. if you are a high level pro it is the responsibility of that pro to check what goes in their gobs.

if he’s made the announcement it’s because he believes he’s innocent

i think every cyclist without fail who has failed a test, starts off with a denial and rebuttal. then slowly things unravel. then a few years after retiring they may confess.

apart from David Millar who confessed, having never failed a test.

Why would the worlds best stage racer take such a risk and ingest something that will get him banned

or kill him.

here

1. Substance found no matter how small he’s guilty simple.
2. I just cannot see where the big debate is going with this.
3. Ban him.