Disgraced former Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich is to pay out a million euro fine to end a fraud case which German prosecutors have been investigating, Focus news magazine reported on its Web site Saturday.
Prosecutors accused the 1997 Tour de France winner of taking performance-enhancing drugs, leading under German law to fraud charges against the 34-year-old on the basis he deceived the public, sponsors and his team.
The United States does not have laws that specifically criminalize doping in sports. However, the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, passed as a direct result of doping scandals in sports, criminalizes the non-medical uses of anabolic-androgenic steroids. One of the primary objectives for the act has been to combat “cheating” in sports although it has been largely ineffective for this purpose. Instead, the federal government has had some recent success using perjury laws to prosecute athletes who use steroids. Maybe sports fraud prosecutions will join perjury as an additional way of making examples out of “immoral” athletes.
Angel Guillermo Heredia was a major steroid source for elite track and field athletes. He has been working with federal investigators for several years; he has disclosed the names of at least a dozen elite track athletes who won Olympic medals and World Chamionships as well as another dozen elite track stars who have not won Olympic medals (”Witness in Track Doping Case Ready to Name Big Names,” April 13).
Among his clients, Mr. Heredia identified 12 athletes who had won a combined 26 Olympic medals and 21 world championships. Four of the 12 athletes, including Ms. Jones, had been named and barred from competition for illicit drug use. Eight of the 12 — notably, the sprinter Maurice Greene — have never been previously linked to performance-enhancing drugs.
Angel Heredia is a Mexican national who lived in Laredo, Texas and utilized his family connections in Mexico to obtain steroids and other pharmaceuticals for athletes. Heredia explains how easy it is for athletes to use steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs and avoid detection.
The jury in cyclist Tammy Thomas’ doping perjury trial did not reach a verdict after the first day of deliberations (”Thomas jury deliberations to continue,” April 3).
Thomas, whose case is the first to go to trial in the five-and-a-half-year Balco investigation, was charged with making false statements to a grand jury in 2003 about substances she is suspected of receiving from Arnold. For the jury to convict Thomas, it must conclude that her statements were false and that they were material to the government’s investigation.
I am certain that Tammy Thomas is anxiously awaiting the verdict. Not only is her freedom in jeopardy but also a future career as an attorney. She has been silent about the case and has not spoken to the media; however, she has been very outspoken in her fashion statements outside the courtroom where she was photographed wearing a San Francisco Giants baseball cap, no doubt in support of other athletes who have been targeted for perjury by this federal investigation.
WADA refuses to worry about trivial genetic factors. WADA is loath to do longitudinal tests of athletes. WADA might find a variable that might refute their laboratory findings or challenge their presumption of laboratory perfection. WADA would never invest time and money doing pedigree studies to determine if a single metabolite above threshold for exogenous testosterone is a trait common in a family, or among a group of people found in a geographical region. But idiosyncratic individual differences in medicine have been documented in many pedigree studies. For example, hematocrit levels above 50% have been found in fathers and sons of elite cyclists. These hematocirt levels are inherited tendencies, not based on EPO doping. The same is true for testosterone/epitestosterone ratio(s) and may be true for Carbon Isotope metabolite delta/delta scores.
While the controversy and debate over the use of anabolic steroids and growth hormone in sports continues, little attention is paid to the use of Adderall and Provigil in academia. Cycling Fans Anonymous discusses an interesting article that appeared in the New York Times earlier this month.
Doping in academia is common, with Provigil and Adderall being the drugs of choice amongst professors and students at university. Apparently these drugs make it possible to concentrate without getting distracted for long periods of time, and to never get sleepy when pulling an all-nighter.
The New York Times compares doping in sports to doping in academia
The scientific and anti-doping community continue to struggle with the development a test for exogenous growth hormone in athletes. They haven’t even been able to produce scientific evidence that growth hormone enhances athletic performance in spite of anecdotal evidence [from athletes and strength coaches] that this is the case.
But science continues to do a good job at finding weakness in the doping controls currently in place. Tip of the hat to Trust But Verify for alerting us of a new study which, among other things, tells us exactly how much exogenous testosterone some athletes can use and still pass the drug test.
Landis, 32, has spent millions of dollars on a defense that tried to cast doubt on the scientific validity of doping tests and the procedures followed at antidoping labs. But last September, in a 2-to-1 ruling, a United States Anti-Doping Agency arbitration panel concluded that Landis had used synthetic testosterone to achieve his comeback win at the 2006 Tour. As a result, he was barred from racing until January 2009….
In its 84-page ruling last year, the United States Anti-Doping Agency panel accepted Landis’s argument that the French antidoping lab that tested his urine samples from the Tour was sloppy in some of its operating procedures, and in how it documented its work. But the panel also found that a more sophisticated second test, conducted after the initial screening proved positive, was accurate.
The 2006 Tour de France winner, who was stripped of his victory last year, seeks to have his title restored by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. It’s the final step in a series of appeals that have cost upward of $2 million, a good portion of which has been paid for with federal funds…
But it will still be costly, and a good chunk of the cost will be footed by USADA, which gets about 70 percent of its $12 million annual budget from the federal government, and the rest from the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Some newspapers, like the Akron Beacon Journal, have redistributed the aforementioned Associated Press news article only to change the title and imply that U.S. taxpayers are also paying for Floyd Landis’ defense
Dr. Gary Gaffney from Steroid Nation posted an article on Huffington Post about the performance enhancing effects of human growth hormone. Gaffney responds to so-called experts who assert with certainty that growth hormone does not help performance in sports. As Lou Schuler stated in a recent post, the true effects of growth hormone on performance are not always empirically “knowable and measurable.”
Gaffney takes note of the lack of empirical research examining the performance enhancing effects of drugs that has historically resulted in mainstream medical organizations failing to recognize performance enhancing drugs. Given this along with results seen in “experiments of nature,” Gaffney feels it is reasonable to conclude that GH has performance enhancing effects:
