Run to Win

The IOC has announced that it is going to retest all of the samples collected from the Olympic games in the wake of the positive tests found by the Tour de France for the latest version of EPO, Continuous Erythropoiesis Receptor Activator. CERA is a stamina boosting drug which was not detectable until recently. It increases the number of red blood cells produced by bone marrow, but lasts longer and requires fewer injections than older forms of EPO.

“There will most definitely be some athletes who thought they could escape being caught because they thought the test would not be ready,” said Christiane Ayotte, director of a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory outside Montreal. “We knew it came to the market just before springtime last year and if there were positives in the Tour de France, then we think there will be positives from Beijing.

“Why the technique was not put into place in Beijing, I have no answer to give you,” she said. “But we’re not missing anything. The opportunity to have those samples retested one or two months later is great.”

The President of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, is planning on making retroactive tests a normal part of the Olympic Games in an effort to discourage doping in the future. The statute of limitations states that an athlete can be found guilty of doping for up to 8 years following an athletic contest.

Christiane Ayotte is positive that there will be more cheats found from the Beijing Games, which is a very cynical point of view that I’m afraid will turn out to be the correct one. There were only 9 positive tests out of 5000, which is less than 0.2% coming positive at the games.

(More Info: NY Times – Photo Credit: Kevork Djansezian)

Last weekend it was too hot to use the computer and I was otherwise occupied, so I never summed up the articles from the previous year.

• The Complete Running Network was relaunched. My biggest complaint with my first impressions was that they had gotten rid of the running blog aggregater service, but that service returned a few months ago. The site held a launch contest, but they never announced who won.
• I gave some reasons that running takes practice just like any other sport in response to an article published at Complete Running.
• There were just shy of 300 finishers in the L/A Bridge Run, which I finally ran this year. Not surprisingly, Ethan Hemphill won both years.
• I found the “Athletes Against Doping” website, which contains a lot of information about what substances are banned in each sport and who the governing bodies are. They have put a new theme in place since last year.
• Two years ago, I explained what EPO was after the furor with Lance Armstrong brought it to attention. In more positive news, Kenenisa Bekele set the 10k world record with a time of 26:17.53.

The NFL and the NFL Players Association have reached an agreement earlier today to improve testing for steroids and other performance enhancing drugs.

The modifications include a 40 percent increase in the number of players randomly tested each week during the preseason, regular season and post-season from seven to 10 per team. Last year, the number of random offseason tests was increased from a maximum of two per player to six per player. These changes bring the total number of steroid tests conducted annually by the NFL to 12,000.

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This week last year was actually fairly eventful.

• One of my most popular articles about Lance Armstrong were published this week last year after he had to deny more doping charges (which also had a follow up article a few days later.) I also wrote a detailed article about what EPO is.
• Eric Rudolph was due to be sentenced for his bombing of the Olympic Games and a few other locations.
• The world record was broken when Kenenisa Bekele ran a 10k in 26:17.53.
• The Nike women’s marathon sold out 9 weeks ahead of the race.
• In basketball news, Huggins quit his job as coach in Cincinatti and a brawl broke out in the African Championships between Nigeria and Algeria.

There were also some random football notes, a dog that boxes like a human, and my first forays into migrating my website from b2evolution to WordPress as my publishing platform.

One again, Lance Armstrong has been accused of doping. I am starting to get tired of reading about it, too…

This time, Le Monde cycling magazine has reported leaked court testimony alleging that Lance Armstrong admitted to his doctors while he was going through chemotherapy in 1996 that he used EPO. The fun part of all this is that the testimony has already been proven fraudulent.

The newspaper reported the Andreus’ account was denied by a third person, Stephanie McIlvain, a friend of Armstrong’s who was also at the session with the doctor. She testified that she did not hear Armstrong make such an admission. “There were probably 10 people in the room. Betsy was apparently the only one that recalls this alleged incident,” said Herman, Armstrong’s attorney. Armstrong’s statement said part of his cancer treatments included steroids and EPO. Armstrong’s doctors repeatedly asked him during his treatment about substances he may have taken and Armstrong answered only that he occasionally drank beer, Herman said.

Apparantly, Lance Armstrong’s court proceedings were not supposed to become public. I do not think that he will get very far though in his effort to take legal action against whoever leaked the documents. This is a lot like Barry Bonds’ leaked grand jury testimony, except it is a much smaller stage and it doesn’t really paint Armstrong as a cheater nearly as conclusively.

(Source: ESPN.com)

Bode Miller came out publicly supporting EPO on Wednesday, according to Ski Racing Magazine.

“I’m surprised it’s illegal,” Miller said, “because in our sport, it would be pretty minimal health risks, and it would actually make it safer for the athletes, because you’d have less chance of making a mistake at the bottom and killing yourself…You have to make four or five decisions every second in skiing, every turn…[These are] conscious decisions, plus there’s another hundred that are instinct. And when your brain starts to slow down, as if you’re holding your breath for two minutes, it makes it damn hard to make those decisions.”

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Earlier this week I wrote about Lance Armstrong being accused of cheating by using the banned substance EPO during his 1999 Tour de France win. Le Ann Welty commented on EPO by describing what it was:

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