Gerard Vroomen's comments

dave_1

on his blog...are not good. e.g. I have not heard of a rider being tested for the biological passport between the end of the 2010 Tour and April 2011.

and

I don’t think there are necessarily bad intentions here, but if the teams are paying a ton of money to fund the biological passport and all that money goes to defending cases so there is little money left for further testing,

http://gerard.cc/2011/08/10/biological-passport/

mididoctors

well what do you reckon?

will some sections of the sport welcome this?

surely they need to sign up to a clause that disallows appeals....or some such measure that discourages lawyer tactics

DavMartinR

Don't know if this is old news but I read in a German magazine that the UCI are changing some of the anti-doping rules. In future the teams will foot the bill for any legal action take in a doping case.

Plus as of the 1st July 2011 anybody convicted will not be allowed back into the sport in any staff capacity. (not sure about riders being able to ride again after completing of they're sentence).

As I say this maybe old news? And internet searching doesn't bring up much.

Doobz

UCI responds

http://www.uci.ch/Modules/ENews/ENewsDe ... ?id=NzUxOA

Press Release: UCI explanation on comments by Gerard Vroomen concerning the Biological Passport

11.08.2011

The International Cycling Union categorically rejects the allegations published by Mr. Gerard Vroomen on his personal blog yesterday concerning biological passports, comments which were then relayed by the velonation.com website. The UCI has therefore decided to provide the following statement in order to protect the public image of cycling and in particular with due respect to the commitment of those working on daily basis in the fight against doping.

The allegation that no tests were carried out under the biological passport testing program between the end of the Tour de France 2010 and April 2011 is absolutely incorrect, as the statistics below clearly demonstrate.

General statistics for Blood Passport Tests only (excluding urine tests and Tour de France 2010) from July 1st 2010 until April 30th 2011 (period referred to by Mr Vroomen)

2010: 1074
2011: 1577
This includes out-of-competition controls, pre-competition and in-competition controls on all major events during this period and team training camps.

Teams:

CERVELO
01.07.2010 - 31.12.2010: 45

GARMIN(-CERVELO)
01.07.2010 - 30.04.2011: 68

The assertions made by Gerard Vroomen’s are misleading, irresponsible, mischievous and clearly show a very weak understanding of this complex subject, an area which goes well beyond financial questions alone. The UCI considers Mr Vroomen’s comments particularly unacceptable given the years of research and investments in this area. The result of UCI’s anti-doping work has been unanimously recognized by international experts and its program has become a worldwide reference in the fight against doping.

The UCI highlights the exceptional quality of competition at the recent Tour de France 2011, a Tour which also reflected a cleaner era in cycling. Mr Vroomen appears exceptionally poorly informed as he would seem not to have been aware of the tests carried out on the two teams he has been involved with. A simple phone call could have clarified the situation for Mr Vrooman should his concerns have been genuine, but he chose not to do this.

Further the UCI refutes any suggestion that anti-doping funds have been used to fund legal bills for fighting legal cases.

The UCI therefore suggests that Mr Vroomen, and the media, ensure that facts are correct before making public statements about UCI’s activities.



UCI Communications Services

dave_1

DavMartinR wrote:

Don't know if this is old news but I read in a German magazine that the UCI are changing some of the anti-doping rules. In future the teams will foot the bill for any legal action take in a doping case.

Plus as of the 1st July 2011 anybody convicted will not be allowed back into the sport in any staff capacity. (not sure about riders being able to ride again after completing of they're sentence).

As I say this maybe old news? And internet searching doesn't bring up much.

it would be fairer if the riders bringing the appeal pay the UCIs fees if they lose the appeal- given the money they force the UCI to suck out of the anti-doping fund to pay the UCIs legal bill to defend.

DavMartinR

Plus it would be interesting to see how many riders would go down the appeal road if they were going to have to pick up the bill. And would the teams encourage riders just to hold they're hands up, rather than taking a financial hit?

Just out of interest does anybody on here know the roughly the cost of a case like Contador's or Valverde's?

Gingerflash

I guess the UCI's statement rather sinks Vroomen's first allegation, that no biopassport testing occurred in that time.

dave_1

maybe the biopassport testers are right to ignore many, target, not use the scattergun approach?. Go for big names only. Mao Tse Tung once said “Kill one and you will frighten a thousand

Tusher

Am I being very slow here?
Bear with me, but I've been trying to work out where the money goes.

I can grasp the cost of expert analysis of potentially career destroying results, and I'll bet Ashenden doesn't come cheap.

And I can grasp the cost of sending a phlebotomist out into the bleak unknown to withdraw the blood. But a tester is one of the poorest paid jobs.

And I can understand that the labs are run by highly skilled graduates operating expensive equipment.

But so are all the blood tests being done by the NHS. Even the (private) cost of complex blood testing for the seriously ill Tusher Cat came to under £100 (out of a total cost of hospitalisation of over £5K). This included the cost of transportation of some blood samples to a University for analysis, as his condition was rare. In other words, as much, if not greater, care was taken in the analysis of feline blood as human. Granted, the interpretation of these results was by the consultant veterinary surgeon, at a cost of around £180 per hour.

So, if the riders were cats, cost per hour of a phlebotomist Band 1 NHS Agenda for Change pay scale=£7.13 per hour. And if they could round them up at a race, they can whip through 12 an hour.
Add in travel to reach an off season athlete, yes, I can see the expense in that, but I'll bet they're not travelling business class. Say £100 travel expenses per tester, some will be more, some less and some non-existent. Reaching Charlie Wegelius in Finland would be pricey, but they could take a bus around Girona and walk around Monaco.

The initial expert analysis would be on a par with a consultant haematoligst, earning around £100K pa. £51 per hour.

Phlebotomist £7.13+ travel expenses £100+initial consultant analysis £51 = £158.13. There are 800 professional riders, so that's £126,504 if they're all tested once a year.

If they test them all thrice, that's £379,512.

Hypothesis is that 25% will be tested every 8 weeks on and off season, that's another 1200 tests, another £205,569.

And just for fun, they're going to test Ricco every Monday morning and Carlos Barredo every Friday evening. That's £16, 445.52.

Total estimated annual cost of £601, 526. Plus the running costs and admin of an office in Switzerland, at UCI Towers. Say another £200K?

Yes it's a lot, but what I'm trying to say is that although I appreciate this is the cutting edge of haematology, and they have to be so very careful, surely the cost cannot be so prohibitive as to prevent repetitive testing as Vroomen suggests? They don't even have to test every single sample- as Dave says, more frequent testing should be enough to put some fear into dirty riders, and they could always stash them in a deep freeze until they've saved up enough spare change to fund a test.

Tusher

PS Please feel free to pick holes in the above post.
PPS Please insure your cat.

Jez mon

I'm guessing that like in FIFA, the UCI has a number of potential monetary black holes...

calvjones

Tusher wrote:

PS Please feel free to pick holes in the above post.
PPS Please insure your cat.

If only you'd come to me when your cat was ill. I've got three you could have had your pick of, gratis

No_Ta_Doctor

Tusher - I assume there's also the cost of freezing B samples for storage, or don't they don't they do that for passport tests?

I imagine that some costs could be minimised by batch testing, so the way forward might be testing of large numbers of riders at one time.

Tusher

Oh yes, I forgot about the B samples.

Running of a deep freeze- Jeeves tells me this costs £29.50 per day for a chest deep freeze.
They could find that down the back of a sofa.


Ooops, that was meant to read per ANNUM.

No_Ta_Doctor

Tusher wrote:

Oh yes, I forgot about the B samples.

Running of a deep freeze- Jeeves tells me this costs £29.50 per day for a chest deep freeze.
They could find that down the back of a sofa.

Well I expect lab grade freezers might be a touch pricier, but point taken. Must be quite a bit of space taken up by all those wee-popsicles as well....

No_Ta_Doctor

On the question of lab testing of blood values, does anyone know exactly what they measure and what machines they need to do so?

I know that in hospitals there is a shift away from big machines in labs to far smaller bits of equipment that can be wheeled round wards, with a turnover timer of a minute or so per test (for the various blood gas parameters they measure).

http://www.radiometer.com/en/products/blood-gas/abl90-flex-analyzer

Disclaimer: I work for this company.

That's obviously doing blood chemistry, rather than blood composition. Does the blood need to be spun or something first? What do they measure and how?

Tusher

No tA Doctor- I don't know.


But I'm assuming that they set initial parameters, and this can be done by machine. As the lab results for a standard Full Blood Count are returned in red print if outside normal limits. Anything outside of the parameter would have to be looked at more closely- I'm sorry, but the details of haematology aren't my thing.

Alex Dowsett for example, would presumably have some bizarre and interesting results. And that would take expert analysis (not to deduce that he has haemophilia, but to work out how that would reflect if he was doping (and I don't doubt Dowsett for a minute). Similarly, menstrual cycles would have an effect.



Oddly enough, and I do appreciate that there would be anonymity, but there hasn't been a "Blood Passport Saved My Life" story............yet. 'Cos I reckon that sooner or later this detail of blood testing is bound to show up the early stages of disease.

No_Ta_Doctor

Tusher - As I understand it they just have a set of standard tests for the blood passport. These are calibrated both against the rider and the general population. Single results could reveal a parameter that was above the allowed measure (where there is a specific allowed maximum e.g. hemocrit) but other than that the results are fed into an algorithm that assess them in the context of previous results. The algorithm flags up any parameter that is lower than 1/1000 chance of being due to natural variation. The rider can be asked to explain it (this is what Dowsett, for example, might have to do if his medical condition mucked his results up). I doubt more work would be done on the original sample there, and am not sure they keep B samples for bio passport results. 3 such results, without reasonable explanation, and you're out.

My main question though was whether it was possible to make the testing cheaper by using quick point of care analysis machines, rather than sending them off to the lab. I just don't know whether such machines exist for the parameters they measure. Hoping for someone with in depth knowledge of the subject to leap out and answer :-)

Interesting idea about detecting early stages of illness.

shinyhelmut

Interesting idea about detecting early stages of illness

Allegedly, in the mid 90s there was a rider who was diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease. One of the blood markers associated with this disease should have shown up as a positive dope test (and this rider was good enough to be tested several times in this period). Somehow he sailed through these tests that could have significantly improved his prognosis.

Happily he was eventually diagnosed and treated and lived happily ever after.