A while back, reader Mike Garrison contacted me and asked what to make of this brief article that appeared in PezCycling News:
Insulin Tests At Tour Of Germany
The UCI has announced that it will begin administering insulin tests in the upcoming Deutschland Tour. The stage race, which starts tomorrow in Kitzbuehel, Austria will see the first ever insulin tests in use – something that was not even possible at this year’s Tour de France and Olympic Games.Apparently Hans-Michael Holczer found something to be happy about after announcing that his team is officially folding: “We have been waiting a lot time for this test. It will be so much harder to cheat now.”
Mike asked how/why anyone would use insulin to increase athletic performance. Well, there turn out to be several possible uses of insulin. One theory is that it helps athletes recover quicker from strength training sessions, like weightlifting. As Elliot Almond reported back in 2004:
For example, an article confiscated during the raid [of Victor Conte’s Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative in September 2003] discussed how insulin acts as an anabolic agent when used with growth hormone. But that’s not how Balco athletes were using insulin, the source said. Insulin, used to treat diabetics, is a banned substance for which there is no test. Balco athletes used it in conjunction with dextrose, whey protein isolates, creatine and other legal supplements that athletes swallowed with water. The insulin helps deliver those nutrients to muscles that are depleted after heavy weightlifting involving the legs. Athletes could recover within three hours instead of a day, the source said.
“Using insulin without the other ingredients doesn’t do you any good,” the source said. “The nutrition was the building blocks.”
In other words, they were using insulin to speed the process of rebuilding the body’s stores of glycogen — among other things — which is something that endurance athletes like cyclists would also want to do. The faster you can replenish your glycogen stores, the sooner you’ll be able to get back out on the bike and ride at full capacity. If you can do so in a matter of hours, rather than a day or more, that could give you a competitive advantage in a competition as grueling as, say, the Tour de France.
Now, using artificial insulin to do such a thing is not without it’s potential dangers. Would the body stop production of natural insulin due to such use? Perhaps. And if an athlete stopped using artificial insulin, how long would it take for the body to restart production of the natural version? Would it restart? If not, one has (in effect) given him/herself diabetes in the quest of athletic excellence. Given all of the potential complications of diabetes, that’s not a choice that I’d make or recommend.
Dawn Richardson, a medical doctor who’s written for VeloNews, penned an article in 2003 that looks at the issue in further depth. It’s worth the read. We haven’t heard much about these new insulin tests and how they’re performed. In fact, as the PezCycling News article notes, this test is so new it wasn’t in use in either the Tour de France or the Beijing Olympics. Who developed the test? What does it look at and measure? Is it a urine or blood test? How was it validated? Right now, I don’t have any answers to those questions.
In time, we can expect that a doping violation will be reported for the use of artificial insulin. When that happens, you can bet that more information will appear. In the meantime, if I dig up anything about how the test actually works, I’ll pass it along.
Public Service Announcement
According to an email that was forwarded on to me today, mobile phone numbers in the United States are now available for telemarketers to use. Which means that you’ll begin to get calls for all sorts of things, and if you answer them, you’ll be burning up minutes of your monthly allotment or paying outright for the call, depending on exactly what kind of service plan you have.
You can add your mobile phone number to the Do Not Call list, however, which should help cut down on annoying phone calls from telemarketers. Take a few moments to do so. For readers outside the US, you can thank your lucky stars you don’t have to deal with such things. At least, I hope you don’t have to deal with telemarketers ringing your mobile phones.
Update: See Adam’s comment before you do anything. As the page he links to at the FTC notes, while you can add your cell phone number to the Do Not Call list, telemarketers aren’t allowed to use automatic dialers to call a cell phone. (Wish I’d known that sooner, as I would have reported several who did.)
From what I’ve found out in researching something else, telemarketers may be able to call your number, as long as they manually dial it. This is why most political polls don’t include calls to owners of cell phones — too time consuming and expensive to conduct, versus the new-fangled automated way. (The polling companies go through some interesting logical games and adjustments to account for the lack of cell phone users in their results, by the way.) In the same way you could, conceivably, wind up getting a telemarketing phone call on your cell phone. But it’s pretty unlikely, given that it takes more time and costs the companies more.
According to the FTC that email is bogus.
Adam,
Thanks for setting me straight on that.
I worked for several years for a market research company’s call center. We did not call cell phones, although at this point in time I am not sure whether or not that was due to a matter of law, or just simply company policy.
Shortly after I left, they instituted auto-dialing. My understanding, based on the discussion about this prior to my quitting, was that it was more because many interviewers dialed at a lower rate than they were capable of, rather than any innate performance advantage. I was a pretty good interviewer before I became a supervisor, and even after that I had occasion to work the phones. I could make as many as 90 dialings an hour, including the time I spent talking to respondents.
William,
So, in a sense, the auto-dialers make staff more productive, as they can make more calls during an hour than they normally would. Sounds like where you worked, it wasn’t a matter of what the staff could do, so much as it was a matter of how well they were actually doing. Greater productivity would mean a lower cost per call, and a lower cost per call completed. (I’m sure that there were/are a number of calls where no one answers, or where the person on the other end of the line doesn’t wish to take part.) True?
True. Some of the staff were, unfortunately, not nearly as productive as they should be. We employeed a number of young people, even HS students, who often were more interested in talking to each other than respondents. I recall one time when, as a supervisor I had to work the phones. I was seated between 2 young workers, who despite of my presence, were talking to each other. So I directed them to stop talking. One of them asked me if I had ever talked to other interviewers when I was one myself, and I truly replied “no!” He then said, “Well, I guess that’s why you are now a supervisor.” Duh!
So the auto dialer would tend to force this type of employee to maintain a certain level of dialings. However, it just might bring down a better employee. We measured productivity as completed interviews per hour, with an estimated production for each survey, which varied depending on the length and nature of the survey. We had some technics for trying to get reluctant respondents to complete surveys, not always successful. It was a rather interesting job, in some ways. I always now try to cooperate with interviewers who call me and I find myself mentally evaluating their technic, as I did as a supervisor. To the best of my knowledge, my old company has never called me.
Most auto dialers have sophisticated answering machine detection (can play pre-recorded messages when a machine is detected, or just hang-up) that will weed out disconnected numbers, fax machines, etc. This provides a huge leap in productivity as the dialer will only pass a call to an agent when it has detected a “live” voice at the other end. This is also why you typically get a delay when answering an automated call – it’s the software analyzing your greeting to determine whether your a live person or a machine.
To think that I come here for a little time-out from work.
What about LA getting Catlin signed on for his testing program. Talk about labs having to be on their toes, that would be quite a showdown.
Cabazon,
You guessed what I’ll be writing about tonight. “The Comeback Kid.”
I always thought that those pauses were an indication of auto dialers. I usually hang up if there’s a long pause on the line (assuming I don’t just avoid answering when my caller ID shows a number I don’t recognize). Some auto-dialing systems, though, don’t do very well on the answering machine/voicemail thing. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve gotten half of the message because the automated system starts a pre-recorded greeting as soon as a voice is detected. And some of those have even been on my cell phone, which has been most annoying.
Yeah, it’s definitely not fool proof – It’s gotten better over time, but it’s still just a program analyzing speech patterns contained in a very small sampling. I’ve gotten a number of calls on my cell, as well – most of which have not pushed a caller ID number – which is a direct violation of the DNC and super frustrating as you can’t report them unless you go through the hassle of pressing “1” or whatever and then try to get the pertinent information assuming you ever wind up talking to a human.
Looking forward to tonight’s post.