In these difficult times for the sport of cycling, bringing about a positive change may well involve innovative, out-of-the-box thinking. James (ORG in comments here and at TBV) writes of an innovative way to solve the Discovery Team’s sponsorship challenge at Steroid Nation.
And on the front page of today’s New York Times (and listed on their homepage, too), comes an article by Juliet Macur detailing the bold approach Team Slipstream is taking to battle doping, or perhaps better put, to ensuring that the taint of doping scandals doesn’t strike them.
What Slipstream are doing is testing each rider’s urine and blood for the effects of doping, rather than the drugs themselves. The program is agressive — 50 blood tests and 50 urine tests will be conducted on each rider throughout the year. In competition. Out of competition. Sick. Healthy. Eventually, the independent agency collecting the data will have charts and graphs that will show each athlete’s test values over time. And they will be able to track the fluctuation in all of these test values.
The theory behind this type of program is that a sudden and sustained change in a rider’s test values, even if the test results fall within the published allowable ranges, may signal doping. If that happens, the Slipstream program requires the rider to sit out of competition for two weeks while he undergoes additional testing in order to determine whether this is a natural occurrence or an instance of doping. Macur goes on to say:
Antidoping scientists say the program, which includes blood and urine testing, is the new paradigm in the fight against doping because it tries to close loopholes in the current system. Cycling is not alone among major sports in trying to stem its doping problems, but none of them use programs as aggressive as this one. Instead of relying on drug tests or police investigations, this method tries to weed out those who use performance-enhancing drugs by catching them before they win a trophy or wear a race leader’s yellow jersey.
In short, the idea is to catch cheaters before come up positive in tests conducted by the various anti-doping agencies and before they put the team in the awkward position of having to deal with a rider accused of doping. It’s a great idea. And one that’s been discussed in various forums and on various blogs for ever since the Floyd Landis scandal errupted last July. As one rider put it:
“It’s an absolute severe pain for us to do, but I’ll do anything to keep from being lumped with the guys accused of cheating,” said Danny Pate, 27, a former under-23 world champion and one of Slipstream’s top riders. “I’ll give DNA. I’ll post all of my information on the Internet. I’ll do anything to help save the sport.”
It’s also a brilliant PR move. Here’s a team that’s agressively combating doping. Good publicity for the team, good publicity for the sponsors. The theory is that by taking these steps, Slipstream will be a team that will be completely free of doping.
Doug Ellis, the New York investor who owns the team, told Macur:
Slipstream’s antidoping program would serve as “an insurance policy” for a potential sponsor that might be skittish about getting involved in cycling, Ellis said. “I’m really committed to reaching our end point, and that’s having a clean team compete in the Tour de France,” he said.
Macur notes in her article that talks for a title sponsor for Slipstream fell through last summer, in the wake of the Landis scandal. So Ellis’ looking for an insurance policy, something to reassure nervous potential sponsors that the team is clean and striving to remain so, is completely understandable.
There are a lot of details to be ironed out, however, before this kind of program will get the stamp of approval from the anti-doping world.
Antidoping scientists say that this testing method is more complicated than it seems. Testers need to determine what they monitor and for how long before an athlete in that system can definitively be stamped as a clean athlete, they say. Still, those officials applauded Slipstream for making an effort to be at the forefront of a program that rewards athletes for being clean.
“I see this as a baby step, but an important step, in trying a new approach,” said Don Catlin, director of the U.C.L.A. testing lab.
There’s just one problem with this approach: What happens if a rider comes up clean with the biological profiling, but somehow tests positive for a banned substance? Macur suggests that the data from a program like this might help prove a rider’s innocence:
Pat McCarty, a 25-year-old Texan and Slipstream rider, was swept up in the biggest doping scandal of the year last summer because he rode for Landis’s team, Phonak, in the Tour de France. When the team folded, McCarty lost his job.
He felt helpless defending himself as a clean rider, he said. An antidoping program like the one Slipstream has put in would be a way for him to prove his innocence and to build trust among teammates, he said.
I’m sure that McCarty felt quite helpless watching Phonak implode. But what of his former captain? He may well be that innocent rider trying to prove his innocence. Would this data have helped him? Perhaps. Certainly it would bolster his case quite a bit to be able to show his testosterone and epitestosterone levels over time. Perhaps there have been times when, after massive efforts, one or the other level was severely depleted the following day.
But having that kind of data at hand requires a bit of fortune telling. Taking blood and urine samples on average of once a week during the year may or may not capture the specific kind of data to defend an athlete who might have a positive anti-doping test. In Landis’ case, performing tests after a training day similar to Stage 16, followed by a day like Stage 17 would be telling as to whether the data at LNDD is consistent with how his body performs. Who would have predicted the need for such data to begin with?
And then there’s the problem of the CIR data in Landis’ case. Unless the testing company were running these sophisticated kinds of tests on the riders, and there were data to compare against, then a rider in Landis’ position would still be stuck in the position of having to explain the test result with no historical data to help.
Also, we don’t learn in the article what Slipstream would do if a rider did come up with a positive anti-doping test. Would they stand by their man? Or would they unceremoniously dump him, the way Landis was dumped by Phonak. My guess is they’d dump him.
In such a situation, would the testing data be available for such a rider’s defense? The data may be gathered and stored by an independent agency, but whose data is it? Slipstream’s or the rider’s?
Doing all this is an expensive proposition, about $20,000 per athlete per year, or about $400,000 for the whole of Slipstream. While Slipstream’s approach is certainly an innovation compared to current methods, it’s an expensive one. Applying such a program to all athletes in cycling would be very expensive.
Someone will need to fund such a system, and finding sponsors to do so will dry up resources that might otherwise go to the teams, themselves. Given the problems (or perceived problems) with doping in sports, this is certainly a worthwhile program to support. Perhaps these programs should be funded by governments, through each country’s anti-doping agency, on a national level, rather than on a sport-by-sport level.
As Don Catlin says, this is a baby step. As long as anti-doping agencies continue testing athletes in and out of competition, however, programs like Slipstream’s aren’t complete insurance against an athlete testing positive. Even the cleanest of athletes could wind up testing positive under the right (actually, wrong) circumstances. How such a case plays out will be the real test of whether the insurance policy pays off.
