On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

Watching the Astana supremacy in the final kilometers of today's stage at the Giro gave me an idea... The biopassport is based on the assertion that there is a statistical uncertainty in testing values. But the more data you have, the tighter the bounds which can be set under a given threshold of certainty. If you're examining data from 8 riders in a batch, while any one of them may exhibit variations consistent with normal variation, if they exhibit correlated variations then that becomes less consistent with random chance. So does it make sense to apply testing protocols to teams as a whole in addition to individual riders? If the team fails analysis while each individual on a team passes, do you eliminate the whole team from the race? It seems a promising idea. No two-year bans, of course:, that would be unfair to individual riders, but disqualification from a race, at least. The key is you're introducing an additional source of variation in addition to tempora...

I saw this on a favorite cycling forum, where I "redacted" some of the key details. Spoke to a friend and reliable source, employee of a large pro team. His sentiments about the tweet is that basically everyone agrees with it and openly think that has organized doping going on to some extent and/or still has back channels to Schumi. Also, the common belief is aligned with what Voigt and TSP said in that if the UCI didn't give the license they would have their pants sued off by entities with very deep pockets so they had little choice. A final rumor is that some riders are using new peptides similar to those that were recently banned like GW-501516 , a new type of growth hormone and IGF that aren't tested for yet, and various banned anabolics in suspension form during training camps so that the ultra short half-life times won't show up on test results. If the rider were to take the substance right after a ride the glow time would only be around 6-8hrs for a n...

It's been commonly recognized that European cycling was deeply contaminated by oxygen-vector doping from approximately 1993 until the CERA test became available in 2008 and the biological passport screening started in 2009 . However, many considered the United States domestic scene to be clean. After all, there was less money to be made in the sport and therefore the investment of oxygen boosters wasn't worth it, people argued. That naive view has long since been disproven. But the issue came up again as VeloNews just published an interview with Will Frischkorn , who's been considered a member of the "lost generation" of talented riders unable to make the jump to Europe because of an unwillingness to embrace the dark side. A key quote: But Frischkorn suggests that there were also several other American riders who decided to take a different direction. He cites some well-known riders who were utilizing EPO programs during the Saturn years (he joined Saturn in...

Chris Horner published his blood values on his web site . I didn't have much interest in this. Indeed, I was much more interested in the America's Cup then in the Vuelta. It's not because I'm not interested in bike racing. Rather it was because it all seemed so unreal, so "not normal", that I just wasn't interested. Horner won. Curious. The data were published in raster form, and would require transcription (or OCR) to do anything interesting with. I didn't have the interest + time to do this. But then I saw this blog post which links to a spreadsheet with the transcribed data. Back in 2009 I made the following plot, which I posted to my blog the following year, showing the reticulocyte percentage in Lance Armstrong's blood, which he published online, plotted versus his hematocrit. It's generally considered a sign of transfusion when the hematocrit increases with a low reticulocyte percentage. Reticulocytes are the young blood ce...

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 hi...

A year ago, Troy Davis was executed for murders he is claimed to have committed, in Georgia. From an article in Time : In the 48 hours leading up to Davis' execution, the nation heard that the case against Davis was built entirely on eyewitnesses who said they saw Davis gun down off-duty cop Mark McPhail. But of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis in his original trial, seven would go on to change their mind and recant. So nine people, who didn't know him, claimed to have seen Troy commit the crime. Seven later recanted, and yet he was still killed by the state. In contrast, there are reportedly ten independent people, each of whom knew him, including teammates, an ex-wife, and an ex-fiancee, testifying that they observed Lance Armstrong either self-administering illegal drugs, or describing his method and practice of doing so. Additionally, Lance is reported to have encouraged others to use these drugs. He left behind blood samples which have been tested by ...

In the Vuelta this year, Joaquin Rodriguez has been untouchable. Not only is he able to outclimb Chris Froome, arguably the dominant climber of the Tour de France, but he's able to respond to every one of Alberto Contador's attacks. Sure, Contador is a convicted doper, and without the good stuff he's simply not going to be at the same level he was before, but it's almost unprecedented in cycling history before the EPO era that riders were able to so dominate stage races they they never once lost time to a rival. Not only is Rodriguez able to mark his rivals, but he's able to finish these climbs with absolutely ferocious attacks which put 5 seconds or more on everyone else (excepting perhaps Valverde when he's still with him) within the last 500 meters. I've never before seen a rider who was able to do that, nor am I aware of any rider in cycling history who could combine such searing intensity with the ability to excel on extended climbs. And that he...