French television station Stade2’s recent report on how micro-dosing performance-enhancing drugs is allowing professional riders to evade detection under the biological passport protocol is very worrying.
Say what you want about the research, the results were damning and a real slap in the face to the biological passport, which has looked shaky at best during its brief existence.
While it has resulted in the sanctioning of a number of riders, including big fish like Denis Menchov, Jonathan Tiernan-Locke and Franco Pellizotti, it has faced a number of challenges and issues as well.
Roman Kreuziger is a case in point. In June 2014, the UCI cited abnormalities in Kreuziger’s biological passport and provisionally suspended him from racing. He was subsequently cleared by the Czech Olympic Committee and promptly resumed racing. The reason for this was that, while Kreuziger’s results were abnormal, they did not fall outside of the expected range dictated by the biological passport software.
The UCI and WADA have announced they will challenged this at the Court of Arbitration for Sport but despite documents needing to be submitted by early December 2014, all is still eerily quiet on this front. Kreuziger hasn’t returned to his Amstel Gold Race winning form of 2013 but has been recently competing in the Spring Classics.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. It has certainly stopped the blatant systematic doping by teams of the 1990s and 2000s. We no longer have riders like Stefan Schumacher winning time trial stages by enormous margins, or Lance Armstrong riding away from some of the best climbers in the world like they were standing still. Doping has become more subtle.
But is that an improvement on what we already had? Has the biological passport just driven cheaters deeper underground?
We may have made it more difficult to catch the cheaters than it was before. A more extensive study would need to be carried out to lend some weight to Stade2’s claims, but if this is true and micro-dosing can beat the system, then maybe the biological passport has shut one door and opened 10 others.
The UCI and WADA can’t just rest on their laurels. Its not enough to place faith in the current anti-doping tests and the biological passport. The solution to the problem lies at the source – the pharmaceutical companies.
Rumours abounded some years ago that the first bust from CERA, the newest generation of EPO, was due to a chemical marker that was added to the drug that allowed it to be tracked through a person’s system.
I know it’s pie-in-the-sky thinking, but is it possible for WADA to work with the pharmaceutical companies to come up with chemical markers that can be introduced into PEDs that make them easier to detect? Can we find a solution at the source, rather than at the end-user? If we are to curb drug use in sport, particularly in cycling where it has manifested so grotesquely, preventative measures must be sought more highly than the current detective approach.
It’s a challenge that all sports face. The WADA Code isn’t even all the clear on what is legal and what isn’t (see the Essendon AFL saga for that one). But one that has become endemic to cycling over the last two and a half decades. The approach of retrospective testing has clearly failed to curb doping bravado. Maybe a new line of thinking and a change of course for WADA is in order.
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