The straight dope

Floyd Landis, the miraculous winner of the Tour de France after being virtually eliminated only 4 stages from the end was able to bask in the glory of victory for about 72 hours before his drug-test results came back positive for elevated testosterone levels. Apparently the norm is 1:1 and the limit is 4:1. Landis' results haven't been published, but they are obviously above the 4:1 threshold.

As with everything, I'm pretty sure we will never know the truth. Even if the International Cycling Union (UCI) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) push forward and determine that Landis was "doped," he will undoubtedly appeal and say that one-or-more of the drugs and/or results of his rotting hip have caused his testosterone levels to sky-rocket. Maybe he's just really virile. Maybe, as some sources say, his high testosterone levels were a natural reaction from his performance on Stage 17, or maybe, as the above article also theorizes, he placed a testosterone patch on his scrotum after Stage 16 to try to rebuild his energy reserves (or maybe he was too tired to be "intimate" with his wife and was embarrassed by this enough to take extraordinary steps).

I think that the majority of riders are doped in one way or another. The doctors who develop the performance-enhancing products are always one step ahead of WADA and the doctors who test. No one has been able to create a reliable test for Human Growth Hormone and that's been available for a few years now. So the anti-doping agents use imperfect tests. They test the relative testosterone levels, they test the relative red-blood cell levels. None of these things prove that you were doped, they just prove that you have a higher than normal level of something. But world-class athletes are already freaks, it only makes sense that some of them are naturally beyond the normal range of normal people. Then there are these agencies like WADA who are just so out there. For the past year or so they have stated their desire to ban "altitude chambers," which recreate the low-oxygen conditions of extreme altitude allowing athletes to create more red blood cells. Wow! They can go train up in the Rockies or the Alps (I hope at least, maybe that's the next step), but they can't put themselves into a compression chamber to do at sea-level what can be done at 15,000 feet. One of the biggest critiques of this is that athletes from poorer countries will even get more disadvantages. European athletes, Americans, etc, can afford to go up into the mountains to train. But the Nigerians probably don't have the money to fly to Aspen for 2 months to train. Altitude chambers were the only way they could "naturally" keep up with the rest of the world.

I don't know what the solution is. I'm pretty sure that since there has been competitive sports, there have been cheaters. Legend has it that Pheidippides ran 26 miles Marathon to Athens to create the modern day "Marathon." I bet he took a couple of short cuts and it was only 24.5 miles. When the payoff is big enough, most people will cheat; it's human nature. The current system makes everyone suspicious of everyone and no one can be determined to be truly "clean." Luckily for me, this is just a blog. I don't know how to fix this problem, but I don't think WADA is helping anything. Cynicism, the bane of professional sports? Probably not, but it can't be helping things.