Contador tested positive for infinitesimally small amounts of clenbuterol. WADA has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to clenbuterol; any detected amount, no matter how small, is sufficient to impose a ban. Contador claims the clenbuterol present in his urine was the result of the consumption of meat contaminated with clenbuterol. Many experts think this is a very plausible explanation for the small amounts of clenbuterol discovered.

The most practical solution to this problem is to change the clenbuterol anti-doping criteria from a zero-tolerance policy to a threshold policy.

Unfortunately, people like Gary Wadler, who recently served on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Prohibited List and Methods Committee, prefer to take the ridiculously impractical approach. Wadler thinks all the governments of the world should change before WADA changes its policy. He feels governments should simply do a better job of keeping clenbuterol out of the food supply.

Read more at Steroids.Info: Experts Think Contador Innocence Possible in Clenbuterol Doping Case

It seems that WADA is no longer interested in developing anti-doping tests that actually detect performance enhancing drugs (PEDs); this is understandable since serious flaws in their anti-doping tests are revealed again and again. Instead, WADA apparently believes the future of anti-doping efforts lies in anti-doping agencies cooperation with pharmaceutical companies to secretly add “traceable molecules” and “trojan molecules” (“Ricco caught by secret doping molecule: WADA chief,” July 23).

In the development of that particular substance, close cooperation occurred between WADA and the pharmaceutical company Roche Pharmaceuticals so that there was a molecule placed in the substance well in advance that was always going to be able to be detected once a test was taken,” Mr Fahey said.

Wow. I wonder what is more deplorable – athletes using performance enhancing drugs OR multi-national pharmaceutical companies secretly adding traceable molecules to consumer products and intentionally hiding this ingredient by failing to disclose it on the label?

Mr Fahey said such cooperation with drug companies was the way forward in fighting drug cheats.

“There’s more and more of this occurring,” he said.

“The more cooperation the scientists can have with the drug companies in the detection of performance-enhancing drugs the greater the likelihood is they will be detected when tests are undertaken.”

I can not imagine regulatory agencies such as the FDA looking favorably upon pharmaceutical products that have undisclosed, secret ingredients which are not essential to the action of the drug. After all, the traceable molecules have absolutely no benefit to the patient.

Certainly, this will upset quite a few people; the fact that Roche Pharmaceuticals is committing resources to non-therapeutic anti-doping efforts is, at the very least, bad public relations coming only a fews weeks after abandoning HIV/AIDS research.

The privacy, legal and regulatory obstacles to WADA’s latest approach to doping detection seems to make it a non-starter. FAIL!

Even if some pharmaceutical companies conspire with WADA in their anti-doping efforts, there are probably hundreds of pharmaceutical companies around the world, particularly in Southeast Asia, that would likely resist the extra expense of adding “traceable” anti-doping molecules to their products. The innumerous pharmaceutical companies have already given WADA problems with all the undetectable biogeneric and biosimilar EPO variants commercially available to athletes.

According to the German television station ARD, Spanish doctor Marcos Maynar offered these services as for internal testing allowing athletes to monitor their doping to ensure that their use of performance enhancing drugs would not be detected by doping controls at the 2008 Tour de France and other pro cycling events. Maynar responded to the allegations that he aided and abetted doping by suggesting that ARD had ulterior motives stemming from bitterness over disgraced cyclist Jan Ullrich (“Marcos Maynar niega que quiera favorecer el dopaje,” July 21).

“Since Jan Ullrich’s tested positive, the Germans have wanted to shit on the Spaniards.”

Maynar admits to sending out the email but only to help pro tour teams with their own internal controls; he denies that his services would allow athletes to escape the detection of performance enhancing drugs. Marcos Maynar and his brother Juan Ignacio Maynar are both experts in anabolic steroids and work at the university laboratory. They claim their blood and urine testing services and legally recognized analysis for biological passports were developed to generate a badly need source of revenue for the University. He strongly denies that he supports doping in cycling (“Spanish lab allegations and confessions in Tour doping,” July 20).

But Marcos Maynar Marino from the university, who sent the email, insisted in a statement that the offer was made to assist the teams to find dopers, not to support substance abuse.

‘We are not supporting doping but try to prevent team-members from doing something which could destroy the team,’ Maynar said.

Maynar’s credibility with regard to doping has been hurt by his alleged involvement in other doping scandals.

In June 2004, Maynar was implicated in a nationwide steroid bust called Operación Gamma II that shutdown a network of steroid distributors providing anabolic steroids to bodybuilders and athletes at gyms in various cities in Spain.

In May 2006, Maynar was found to share clients with Eufemiano Fuentes, the mastermind behind the Operación Puerto doping scandal.

In May 2008, Maynar was the team doctor for the Portueguese LA MSS team who authorities found guilty of systematic doping.

Maynar said he was surprised by the raid, insisting that the team always “presented normal levels.”

“My relationship with the team is merely as a collaborator. I only go to races to control the hematocrit levels of the cyclists and look after the nutritional part of the athletes,” Maynar was quoted as saying.

Hat tip to Cycling Fans Anonymous.

WADA gave notice to cyclists competing at the 2008 Tour de France that they were now able to detect the performance enhancing drug Mircera (methoxy polyethylene glycol-epoetin beta), a third generation version of erythropoietin (EPO) belonging to the category of drugs known as Continuous Erythropoeitin Receptor Activators (CERA).

Doping experts concerned with the fairness of the doping protocols administered by WADA-accredited labs were quick to raise questions about the new CERA doping detection methods (“Larry: New CERA test, looking at Hamilton’s HBT,” July 20).

The TdF news concerning the detection of CERA has raised a lot of questions, including legal questions. How is it that AFLD can use a “secret” test, one that is not referenced in any of the WADA rules? How can we know that the lab’s test is valid? If there are no WADA rules for the test, how can the lab determine that the results of the test are sufficient to prove an AAF?

The folks at Trust But Verify (TBV) offer an excellent primer on unaccredited WADA anti-doping methods used to detect adverse analytical findings (AAFs). TBV, citing precedent from the Tyler Hamilton case, explains why it is legal for WADA-accredited labs to use “secret” and “unaccredited” testing methods in some cases.

[I]t is not necessary for WADA to approve a lab method before the method can be used to prove an AAF.

The panel also ruled that a WADA lab CAN use an unaccredited test method to prove an AAF, so long as the lab can prove two things. First, the lab must prove that the unaccredited test method was conducted “in accordance with the scientific community’s practices and procedures.” Second, the lab must prove that it “satisfied itself as to the validity of the [unaccredited] method before using it.” If the lab can satisfy this two-pronged burden of proof, then (according to the Hamilton decision) the lab gets the benefit of the presumption under WADA Code 3.2.1. If the lab cannot satisfy this burden, then the lab method in question cannot be used, and the AAF against the athlete must be dismissed.

The reasoning in the Hamilton case was based on the panel’s assumption that sometimes WADA labs must use unaccredited test methods. New forms of doping arise all the time, but the formal lab accreditation process is relatively slow (the method at issue in the Hamilton case was not formally validated until more than a year after the lab’s finding of the Hamilton AAF). If labs are going to detect new performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), they may have to do so with new (and thus unaccredited) test methods. But since accreditation is an important step in making sure that test methods are “fit for purpose”, the panel reasoned that the validity of unaccredited test methods must be defended by the lab and ultimately ruled upon by the arbitration panel.

This means that AFLD may still be required to scientifically validate the new CERA test in the cases of Miguel Beltran, Moises Duenas Nevado, Riccardo Ricco and any other cyclists who accused of allegedly using Mirecera during the 2008 Tour de France.

Steroid and doping expert Dr. John Hoberman of the University of Texas wrote an article about the Festina scandal at the 1998 Tour de France for me almost ten years ago. Hoberman thought that the public had finally accepted that the Tour de France during a “definitive outing of the Tour as a virtual pharmacy on wheels.”

The Tour debacle has finally made it acceptable to say in public and without provocation what many have known for a long time, namely, that long-distance cycling has been the most consistently drug-soaked sport of the twentieth century. 

Unfortunately, we still have not come to terms with an acknowledgement of the scope of doping in cycling. We continue to entertain incredulous stories that doping in the sport is limited to certain generations of riders or specific geographical areas. We still believe in fairy tales that tell us a dope-free Tour de France is possible. It is not. So what should be done about doping in cycling?

We could continue to put our faith in anti-doping efforts. But the history of drug testing in competitive sports over the past 30 years or so has taught us that doping technology is always far ahead of doping detection. We can ignore history and pretend that things will be different this year or next year – or the year after that.

Hoberman puts forward an argument articulated by Hans Halter in the German newspaper Der Spiegel. The admittedly unpopular argument is to accept doping in such extreme sports such as cycling or, more accurately, to “quitely ignore” the pervasive and universal doping in the Tour de France (“A Pharmacy on Wheels – The Tour De France Doping Scandal,” November 15, 1998).

As one unblinkered observer put it at the height of the furor: “For as long as the Tour has existed, since 1903, its participants have been doping themselves. No dope, no hope. The Tour, in fact, is only possible because — not despite the fact — there is doping. For 60 years this was allowed. For the past 30 years it has been officially prohibited. Yet the fact remains: great cyclists have been doping themselves, then as now.”

[...]

There is, in fact, a case to be made for quietly ignoring the virtually universal doping that goes on in this “extreme sport,” an argument that accepts and even embraces the medically extreme and potentially fatal character of the ordeal itself. It is an argument that is (from its own perspective) properly contemptuous of medical humanitarianism and fastidious concerns about sportsmanship in the traditional (and here outmoded) sense of the term. This argument was boldly launched into the midst of the Tour madness by the German journalist, physician, and cycling fan Hans Halter, who presented it with the precisely correct doses of principled defiance and ironic pathos that this philosophy of “sport” requires. “No one can seriously expect,” Halter wrote, “that these extreme athletes, tortured by tropical heat and freezing cold, by rain and storm, should renounce all of the palliatives that are available to them.” Indeed, no one can, for those who accept the ordeal must concede to the martyrs at least a measure of relief. What the Tour scandal tells us is that modern society does not even know how to begin to draw the line.

Hoberman’s essay is still one of the most insightful articles into the doping culture in professional cycling that I have read. It hits uncomfortably close to the truth about the nature of “extreme sports.”

Faith in the new generation of cycling was shattered when Riccardo Ricco tested positive for EPO and the new CERA drug Mircera.  How could the story of “new cycling” explain why the 24-year old leader of the best young rider competition was doping just the same as the old generation of cycling? The old generation could no longer be blamed for the scourge of doping in cycling. Cycling needed a new story!

The Scotsman was happy to provide a new story to preserve the integrity of the Tour: Blame the country of Spain for doping problems in cycling! If Spain were eliminated from world maps, the Tour de France would apparently be a very clean sport. How did the Scotsman arrive at this conclusion? (“Tour’s three doping cases to date are all linked to a country where old cultures endure,” July 18)

• Two of the four riders failing drug test and/or implicated in doping scandal during the 2008 Tour de France are, in fact, Spaniards (Miguel Beltran and Moises Duenas).
• The other two riders, while NOT from Spain, rode for a Spanish team! (Leonardo Piepoli and Riccardo Ricco ride the Spanish road racing team Saunier Duval-Scott.)
• Spain has evil dope doctors that work with professional cyclists. (Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes was the Spanish mastermind behind Operation Puerto in 2006. Plus, Dr. Jesus Losa of Spain appears to have helped Moises Duenas dope.)
• Cyclist David Millar asserts that performance enhancing drugs and doping thrive in the “wild west” of Spain. Millar makes an incendiary attack on the Spanish culture as unworthy of competing in the Tour de France (no voluntary Millar-torium here). 

“They have this culture embedded in them and they honestly believe it is not possible to do these things without (doping]. It’s sad. You see that Christian (Vande Velde, Millar’s Garmin team-mate] is third overall, and he is doing it without any injections, without anything. If you can’t do it like that then you are not good enough – it’s as simple as that.”

• International Cycling Union (UCI) president Pat McQuaid has identified clandestine “cocoons” in Spain where doping is easily rationalized; professional cyclists “live in their own little world, surrounded by a small number of people belonging to the old guard; and they can be very influenced by those within that cocoon.” Notice how McQuaid masterfully interjects the “generational” story as a subplot in the “blame Spain” story.

Of course, a person would have to be incredibly naive to believe that doping in cycling is restricted to the geographical boundaries of a single country or to particular a generation.

Cycling is synonymous with doping. No fanciful stories or fairy tales will explain away doping in the Tour de France.

Mircera is a third generation version of erythropoietin manufactured by pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-LaRoche that has been called “Super EPO.” The big news at the Tour is not that another cyclist was caught doping, it is that a cyclist was caught using a performance enhancing drug that was widely considered “undetectable.” The quick withdrawal of the entire Saunier Duval team from the Tour supports speculation that Mircera was the team’s secret weapon (“Riccardo Riccò tests positive; Saunier Duval team withdraws from Tour de France,” July 17).

Recent rumors in the sport had suggested that some riders were using an undetectable new oxygen-enhancing drug widely thought to be Roche’s Micera. The existence of a test for CERA was not announced, but Riccò’s positive for the substance suggests that it has not escaped the attention of anti-doping officials.

WADA spokesperson Frédéric Donzé took used the opportunity to congratulate WADA on a job well-done.

“WADA is very much aware of the development of new EPOs and biosimilar EPOs in an expanding market.”

“In the case of Mircera (CERA ) thanks to the cooperation of the manufacturer of this substance (Roche) and of WADA-accredited laboratories, WADA received the molecule well in advance and was able to develop ways to detect it,” he said. “This case shows the significant work that WADA conducts in anticipating doping trends, including by closely cooperating with pharmaceutical companies at very early stages of the development of molecules or substances for therapeutic purposes to develop detection methods for anti-doping purposes.”

Mircera is an artificial form of erythropoietin (EPO) stimulators similar to Amgen’s Epogen and Aranesp. But Mircera is thought to be superior to Epogen and Aranesp due to the use of pegylation technology that provides a sustained release of erythropoiesis stimulating proteins (ESPs). PEGylated erythropoietin (PEG-EPO) results when a molecule of polyethylene glycol is attached. 

Mircera (PEG-EPO) belongs to a category of drugs called Continuous Erythropoeitin Receptor Activators or CERA because it continuously interacts with the EPO receptor producing longer lasting effects. Only 1-2 monthly injections of Mircera have similar results to three times weekly injections of Epogen. Detailed instructions on using Mircera can be found on the Internet.

Trust But Verify wonders if Ricco actually tested positive for Mircera or was simply caught with the product in his possession (during a police search of his room). TBV points to comments made by blood doping expert Professor Michael Audren to CyclingNews.com.

It’s a delayed-action EPO, which has a different molecular mass from EPO. It’s only been commercially available since the start of the year. We can tell when someone’s used it but we can’t declare them positive. In that respect it’s like Dynepo, another EPO-like product. We know that Micera was being used on the Giro, so I’m not surprised that it’s also turned up at the Tour. But I would be very surprised if they AFLD had declared Riccò positive for Micera, for the reasons I’ve just mentioned. Maybe they searched Riccò’s room and found the product itself… (emphasis added by TBV)

It would not surprise us if TBV and Professor Audren are correct; WADA is well-known for overstating their ability to effectively and reliably detect various performance enhancing drugs.

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.

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 (“Taxpayers to Pay for Landis’ Defense,” March 16).

But cycling websites were quick to point out the biases and inaccuracies in the stories and headlines. Trust But Verify discusses how truth is often a casualty of journalistic sensationalism.

Ohio.com proves that little things like “details” don’t really matter much when you’re trying to get a reaction to a headline. “Taxpayers to Pay for Landis Defense“ insinuates that we have footed the bill not only for USADA’s prosecution of the case, but also for all of Floyd Landis’ defense as well. Let’s never let the truth get in the way of “journalistic” sensationalism. Landis has enough on his plate without being stoned by angry US taxpayers.

Racejunkie finds it interesting how the media can’t get enough of the Congressional hearings on steroids in baseball without nary a complaint about the colossal waste of taxpayer funds.

[N]ow there’s a brand new outrage to stick on him: he alone is sucking up your precious tax dollars that could be used to fill deserving potholes in your own neighborhood with his malicious selfish whining about “Justice this!” and “Fair play that!” Leaving aside that no-one’s been crying about using tax dollars to exonerate a pack of couch-glomming overpaid baseball players whose necks and biceps clearly increased in size from toothpicks to actual redwoods over the suspicious span of about a week…

Velo Vertomax suggests that the blame be redirected towards WADA and their failure to remedy incompetent testing procedures at so-called accredited labs which lead to astronomical costs of defending sloppy work.

There has been some discussion of the amount of money spent by USADA to defend the Floyd Landis Adverse Analytical Finding. What is always forgotten is the deplorable state of Chatenay-Malabry testing and how expensive it is to defend bad lab work. WADA could correct these problems if they trained their personnel on how to the lab work, how to keep records straight, and how to keep a strict chain-of-custody…

If USADA and the taxpayers are burdened with expensive litigation to defend the poor lab performance of LNDD then WADA should encourage the laboratories to train their personnel on how to run the tests, how to set up the equipment, how to code the data on the Lab Document Package, how to make corrections correctly, and how to maintain a credible chain of custody. Then these expensive and prolonged appeals would be prevented saving everyone money. U.S. taxpayer and athlete. Until WADA makes a valiant attempt to correct the existing problems appeals will continue since the laboratory results can not be relied upon to prove the Adverse Analytical Finding.

Of course, my basic question is why does the federal government need to have any role in enforcing the rules of sports? And why is federal funding of one particular rule (doping) the only rule that requires federal intervention? As far as I’m concerned, all federal taxpayer money spent on enforcing the rules of a sporting game is a waste.

The German Skiing Federation (DSV) subsequently decided to take legal action against the journalists employed by the German television station (ARD).  Interestingly, ARD is one of the sponsors paying DSV seven million euros for annual television rights to World Cup events. So, it should come as no surprise that ARD promptly issued a public apology for unprofessional behavior and “journalistic errors” in making accusations of illegal blood doping without proof.

Furthermore, there have been suggestions that “Russian criminal elements” may have pressured Austrian officials investigating Humanplasma lab.