Lance Armstrong blood values from 2009 Tour de France

There's recently been a big story about how Lance Armstrong's biological passport blood values from 2009 were "consistent with doping". My response was "this is news?"

It was news back in 2009, when Lance was boldly publishing his blood values on-line to prove his cleanliness, perhaps thinking people would pay attention only to that his hematocrit was well under the 50% limit, until it was pointed out by Jakob Mørkeberg, a Danish researcher, that the blood values he was posting appeared consistent with doping. His response: "What do you call a guy who graduates last in the class in medical school? Doctor." Funny, dude, but it did nothing to address the analysis.

You don't need to be a medical expert to see something was amiss. Here's a plot I made at the time:

Lance came out of the second rest day that Tour raging. A year later, out of contention, he came out of the second rest day fatigued and uncompetitive. Lance skipped his supplements, was the obvious interpretation at the time. I don't think there was anything subtle about it.

Here's what Michael Ashenden says in this recent article in VeloNation:

His reticulocyte levels were below the average of the rest of his reported results...consistent with the use of blood transfusions.

It doesn't take a degree in statistics to analyze the data in that plot.

There's a nice article on this matter on The Sports Scientists Blog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more