Anti-doping results are getting a little bit scary

Jonathan Tiernan-Locke claims he got a two-year doping ban from drinking too many pints.

As a full time university student, who is on a biological passport, this claim is relevant to my interests. Frankly, it’s a little bit scary.

Although we would be very gullible indeed if we believed him, I still can’t help but feel alarmed.

His doping was uncovered or ‘proven’ by biological passport. A panel of experts, looking at the fluctuations of naturally occurring substances in his blood, ruled that their changes over time couldn’t be explained by any legal methods or natural causes. This is enough to cop two years, not to mention assassination of character.

In simpler times there were positive tests from urine samples and then suspensions of two years, life for second offences. The technical nuance then went about as far as “now for the ‘b’ sample” and then it was case closed.

Michael Rogers tested positive for clenbuterol. Drug in bodily fluid: gotcha, right? Not so fast, it’s not that simple anymore. Rogers was able to successfully prove that the substance infiltrated his body through contaminated food. His only crime was eating a dodgy steak. He regained his position in the sport, returning for one of his most successful seasons ever.

Then, Daryl Impey tested positive for probenicid and successfully proved that his internal bodily juices had been tainted through a demonstrated case of supplement contamination. All he did was buy some gel caps, like the ones fish oil comes in.

So what is ‘strict liability’ then? It means you, yes all of you, if you want to do sports, are to be held accountable for every single molecule inside your body and it doesn’t matter how they get there. Basically, it’s up to you to keep your insides pure.

It seems though, strict liability now comes with a caveat. That is, it only applies unless your expensive lawyers can prove the offending molecules got there without you knowing, and in levels too low to improve your performance, in which case you might get off after a few months of arguing the point.

Cases like Tiernan-Locke’s show us that with biological passports, strict liability also means you are responsible for keeping your blood values within the range deemed natural by the boss doctors. If your numbers are deemed too alien, then it’s up to you to prove how that occurred.

At this stage it looks like Tiernan-Locke isn’t going to bother going to court to make the point about the drinking bender, probably because it’s a made up excuse. But then who knows? I’m not a doctor.

If we didn’t have strict liability though, there would be so many holes in our anti-doping net that it would be basically useless. So we’ll likely have to keep dealing with this collateral.

We also now have banned substances – like Argon and Xenon – for which there is no known biological test. You can’t test positive for them. This might seem like a ruling that will essentially only punish the honest riders and well, speaking of collateral, it pretty much will.

Rogers and Impey seem to have proven just how simple it is for an athlete to accidentally and inadvertently test positive, no matter how strictly they follow the rules. Steak and gel capsules aren’t banned, nor can they be.

Professional cyclists now exist in a space where they cannot ever completely protect themselves from testing positive. They can only manage their body’s ever-present risk of contamination.

The evidence shows they should give up meat, starting with steak in high-risk countries. They should not take perfectly legal medicine, vitamins or supplements for which scientific health and performance benefits are proven. Thanks to Tiernan-Locke there’s now even a shaky little question mark over beer. Where will it end?

What seems to be emerging is an era in which anti-doping authorities are either failing to pin down legal cases against the dopers they catch, or they are catching innocent athletes.

This is an era where unfortunately, but perhaps unavoidably, anti-doping processes jeopardise the futures and reputations of even the most dedicatedly clean riders. For athletes and for fans of athletes, that’s a bit scary.