Please excuse my ignorance

Frank the tank

But I thought them blood passport thingies were supposed to (hopefully) put a stop to doping and highlight any fluctuations/deviations in the blood of cyclists. Or have I mis-understood the idea behind the concept.

Could any of you well informed lads and lasses offer an answer please.

Kléber

You can detect some things from the bio passport but not everything. Think of it like giving a policeman a radar gun so he can check the speed of passing cars, this doesn't help him catch drink drivers, he needs a breathylser machine for that. Same for the blood profiling, it gives some clues in some directions but not everywhere, it's only one weapon.

We'll see how effective it is soon as the UCI is set to announce details of the riders it has caught. It promised this "within days or weeks" back in February and I'm hoping there's no repeat of the Rebellin mess where those who get busted by the UCI have not been getting results since the alarm bells starting ringing inside UCI HQ back in February.

Frank the tank

Cheers Kleber, that clarifies things nicely.

Bronzie

The problem I see with the passport system is that ultimately any infringement is based solely on the opinion of a panel of experts. There is no lab analysis to say that chemical X has been detected, just a balance of probabilities based on these expert's advice as to whether a rider has doped or not.

The UCI has stated that it will not proceed with a case unless the experts say it is 99+% certain that an offence has committed. But as with any panel of experts, the answer can vary depending on which expert you ask. I forsee the first case being mired in a legal quagmire of one panel of experts versus another.

The plus side of the system is that any rider subject to dodgy results can be more heavily targetted for the traditional testing methods which are more watertight IMO.