Flying Research

Today was a travel day for me. So I spent part of the time sitting on the plane catching up on some reading I’ve been meaning to do. Reading about testosterone, epitestosterone and other forms of doping. I tried reading this stuff at night, but it’s a bit dry and I found myself falling asleep.

Of course, the article on caffeine content of various drinks should have kept me awake. (This was just an interesting article and not entirely related to the Landis case — unless you look at that notation about WADA tracking caffeine levels in athletes that appears in one of the Ferret documents.) Interestingly, the article I was reading showed one drink that had 141.5 mg per serving. That’s a bit of a jolt (and I don’t mean the cola, either). Drink a few of those and you’ll be riding your mountain bike up Mt. Everest in record time. Better make sure your bike’s suspension is tweaked for the downhill, though, because that’s gonna be brutally fast. And better not to tell Dick Pound you’ve been consuming caffeine. He might go ballistic.

So today, I was reading an article called “Evaluation of Testosterone/Epitestosterone Ratio Influential Factors as Determined in Doping Analysis” which was published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology’s March 2000. This is an article my sister-in-law (a molecular biologist who specializes in endocrinology) dug up for me as part of my search for actual, published data on normal and abnormal T and E values. Three items caught eye:

• One, an item related to the effect of strenuous exercise on the T/E ratio
• Another, mentions that according to the International Olympic Committee the maximum concentration of E in the urine before an athlete would be suspected of using E as a masking agent is 200 ng/ml
• And the third has to do with naturally high T/E levels, but I’ll leave the details of that for a little bit later

And, of course, this all relates to the Floyd Landis case.

So let’s start with the first bullet point. Here’s what the authors of the article have to say about the effects of strenuous exercise on an athlete’s T/E ratio:

The influence of exercise on the T/E ratio is still unclear. [citations of various studies omitted]

These contradictory results should be a challenge for further investigation, especially because the control of athletes often takes place after a match. A lot of parameters has to be taken into account, for example, exercise duration, intensity, and repetition, and the type of exercise, gender, and general condition, and ethnic background of volunteers.

So this is interesting. Landis had a pretty bad day before stage 17. Perhaps the impact of the exertion from that effort had something to do with his results. Certainly not out of the realm of possibility, but probably not the major or the only cause.

The second bullet relates to the use of epitestosterone as a masking agent, and the level that’s considered suspicious speaks for itself, at least to some extent. By ingesting a certain amount of E, in theory, you could keep the T/E ratio down, thus hiding the fact that you’ve been doping. A real doper might try to fool the tests by masking the E (which, if you look at the Landis E values, clearly isn’t the case). Landis’ values are quite the opposite — extremely low, rather than extremely high.

Now the third bullet is the most interesting. This article actually has a brief discussion of naturally occurring high T/E ratios. Turns out, there’s been some research into these and here’s what the article says:

… as Dehennin and co-workers already suggested, naturally high T/E ratios are mostly due to a relatively low EG (epitestosterone glucoronide) level, whereas ES (epitestosterone sulfate) is relatively high

This citation refers to two articles, one published in 1994 and the other in 1996, which I’m going to track down and read further. This tidbit also suggests that some additional analysis, prior to going to the CIR test, could determine whether a high T/E ratio is occurring naturally versus occurring due to doping. The authors go on to say that another type of test called electrospray HPLC-MS will gain importance as a more robust method to determine the T/E ratio. They actually discuss several alternate methods for determining the T/E ratios and whether an athlete is doping.

Now, if you go back and look at all the numbers for T and E in the Landis results, what you’ll find (with one pretty notable exception) is precisely what the authors of that article describe: Normal T levels with an abnormally low E. In other words, what this article shows is that the most likely explanation for Floyd Landis T/E ratios is that they were due to natural causes.

I wonder if Arnie Baker, Howard Jacobs and the rest of Landis’ defense team have seen this article yet? If not, they should probably give it a good read.

And I wonder if the people at LNDD and WADA are aware of this article and just conveniently choose to ignore the commentary and suggestions that it contains. Or are they just ignorant of this research?