Been quiet for a while - then BANG! Ribeiro, Nozal and Guerra positive for CERA

What can I say? Legalise it? Control it? Ban it? Pick one, or perhaps 2.

The winner of the Tour of Portugal and two of his teammates have tested positive for EPO-CERA. The Continental team Liberty Seguros has been hit with three doping cases, as Nuno Ribeiro, Isidro Nozal and Hector Guerra all tested positive for EPO-CERA in controls prior to the Tour of Portugal last month. Team manager Vito Paulo Branco has confirmed the positive findings.

This had to happen eventually - the post-Tour drug debacle

Here we go again. Innocent until proven guilty, as always. Mud sticks, though.

On Friday, the UCI announced that Astarloza tested positive for recombinant EPO, a blood booster, in an out-of-competition control. He is the second rider from the Euskaltel-Euskadi team to return a positive doping control in June. Inigo Landaluze was suspended in July after twice testing positive for EPO CERA.

15 Le Tour 2008 samples to be retested

We already knew that 30 riders were in the frame for biological passport anomalies, now we know that 15 riders are being targeted from the 2008 Tour de France as well. (There may or may not be some overlap here as we have different agencies at work - seemingly competing for top prize in dope sleuthing.) An earlier unconfirmed suggestion was that the 15 were targeted from the top 20 riders in last year's tour. If true, there will be some big names here... and none of them will be from Astana...

The French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD) will re-examine urine samples from the 2008 Tour de France according to comments made on Sunday by the agency's President, Pierre Bordry. "Before this year's Tour start in Monaco, we warned some 15 riders that in conformity with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code, we would analyze retrospectively (the) samples taken in the 2008 Tour," Bordry told Reuters.

Doper Kohl says what they all say - it's not just me! It's everybody!

Of course you'd be thinking that - how else do you come to terms with the unethical practice of cheating? Especially so at a very public, very high-profile race like Le Tour? Whilst there's some merit in the argument that if I can only come 3rd, and everyone else in the Top 10 was keeping up pretty well, and I am taking CERA, then they must all be taking CERA too, it's flawed thinking. Who's to say that the rest of the Top 10 weren't clean but simply substantially better prepared, better supported or - quite likely - had bigger "engines" than yourself?

“At first, I once again tried to reassure myself: ‘OK, I was dead—but we were all dead,”’ Kohl said. “Many other riders had taken (banned substances).

Which isn't to say that some other riders weren't also taking advantage of some "help", either. Just that we can't actually know it.

Kohl admits to doping from 2005 onwards #cycling

What seemed to be a case of crash-and-recover-quicker-with-"insert drug here" has become more of a whole-of-pro-career effort. Full details here: Bernhard Kohl, winner of the mountains classification and third overall at the Tour de France, told investigators the names of all the people who helped him dope. The Austrian included the name of the person who provided him the blood booster CERA-EPO for which he tested positive for at the Tour de France, he said at a press conference Tuesday evening in Vienna, Austria.

It will be hard to come back from here, surely. Not hard to feel some sympathy though for someone who was clearly sucked into a toxic vortex of deceit at a young - but adult - age.

Schumacher cops 2 year ban, Valverde investigated again

The process can't really get any slower or messier, surely? We all remember Stefan Schumacher's tireless attacking efforts in Le Tour '08 and wished we could all back up and fly again like that. We also remember the positive test for CERA, and Stefan's denials. Now he has (finally) been given a 2 year ban for doping: The French National Anti-Doping Agency AFLD has suspended German rider Stefan Schumacher for two years after testing positive for CERA, a new generation of EPO, during the Tour de France. Schumacher confirmed the suspension Thursday evening, calling the decision "a shock" and the process a "farce". In between times he has been in limbo, expecting to get a licence to race in '09. At least he now has some certainty, pending appeal.

Less certain is Valverde's future. Alejandro Valverde arrived in Rome, Italy on Thursday to appear before the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) only to be informed he was now also under criminal investigation. The Spaniard was informed that the separate probe had been opened when he arrived at Rome's Olympic Stadium for his hearing with CONI's anti-doping prosecutor. Once implicated and cleared of involvement in the Fuentes blood-bag fiasco, the whole kettle of fishy activities has been reopened; Valverde's DNA has allegedly been identified (via an Italian-initiated blood sample taken during the 2008 Tour de France, no less) and matched to one of the blood bags in question. He denies any involvement. Yes, these are Italian investigations into a Spanish rider over a Spanish-originated allegation. Go figure.

The main problem appears to lie in the differences between countries, their specific criminal legislation and their local sporting bodies' treatment of doping. Whilst the UCI has a process, it's become clouded by where the offence takes place and the country under which the rider races. Now it's a global sport and a global problem but surely if we are to set and enforce doping regulations we must get a consistent banned list and set process together, act quickly and decisively and stop messing around like this... surely it's not that hard? Evidence suggests it's almost impossible to be fair and transparent at the moment.

Kohl's confession buys no time

No discount for the confessor: Bernhard Kohl received a two-year suspension this afternoon in Vienna for having used EPO-CERA at the Tour de France. According to press reports, Austrian Kohl did not have any comment on the sentence.

Sella cooperates, gets a year off

It doesn't pay to get caught, but if you own up you may get a shorter break:
The Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) recommended a one-year suspension for Emanuele Sella, who tested positive for EPO-CERA this last July. The Italian, winner of three stages and the mountains jersey in the Giro d'Italia, cooperated with investigators to earn a reduced sentence.

That's it from him

What a way to go. One brief moment of glory, supported by a few doses of illicit drugs. Kill your career, and your team's. Disappoint sponsors and supporters. Drag everyone down. On the bright side, we are still catching the cheats.

Team Gerolsteiner's Bernhard Kohl has confirmed that he tested positive for CERA during the Tour de France to team manager Hans-Michael Holczer. "I had a call from Bernhard Kohl and he confirmed to me that he had been told of the positive test," Holczer said. "The substance is EPO CERA."

This isn't really working, is it? Should we legalise everything and monitor only for safety? Or perhaps Greg LeMond's sealed SRM power-output monitoring idea is the way to go, rather than play constant catch-up with new variations on a theme? Make more than an incremental gain in power, you get a please explain. Too big a jump, or into the realms of fantasy, you are out.

Piepoli and Schumacher - positive is so negative

According to unconfirmed reports, Leonardo Piepoli - who had seemingly admitted and then denied doping - has tested positive at the 2008 TdF to CERA. No surprise there, really. More surprising, perhaps - although many would have found it easy to believe at the time, when he seemed to be riding out of his skin - is Stefan Schumacher, positive in the same way. Funny how those unbelievable results turn out to be so - umm, unbelievable?

The German who rides for Holczer's soon to be defunct Gerolsteiner team won both of the time trials in this year's Tour, taking the yellow jersey after his win on stage four and holding it for two days before crashing during the sprint into Super Besse on stage six. His second win came on stage 20 where he beat world champion Fabian Cancellara.

I trust we can rely on at least some of our 'unbelievable' riders. Those that are consistently amazing, like Cancellara for example, draw less suspicion for their performances. Let's hope that trust is repaid. (Alternatively, if it's not working anyway - let's just ditch this 'detection and punishment' model completely and be fair to everyone.)

Do I smell smoke?

The speculation just keeps growing. It's been bubbling away since Le Tour ended... then died a bit as we got on with life. However the Schleck family saga has played a part in re-igniting interest. You know, the father's car was inspected, then months later son Frank is implicated (without proof, as yet) in Operation Puerto. And now we all wonder, who are these masked men? And will they be unmasked in 2 weeks or so?

Anti-doping expert Dr. Rasmus Damsgaard, who runs an independent testing system for the Team CSC-Saxo Bank and Astana teams, noted in July that he felt the EPO use in the peloton had not been adequately dealt with. After examining the data from several tests which had been declared negative by World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) laboratories, he said the agency was "sitting on a mountain of EPO positives".

I'm not saying he's innocent, but...

Then again I am saying something like 'we can't be so certain about these things'. Read it and weep: In the case of Landis, who had no previous record of doping violations, the chances that the positive result could result from anything except cheating - a lab error, an abnormally high natural occurrence of testosterone - were dismissed as not credible. The problem, Mr Berry said, is that for the actual process used by doping labs there is no body of scientific data to show just how rare "false positives" or "false negatives" really are, and that such data is essential for interpreting lab results.

Introducing probabilities into drug testing is interesting and debatable, but I accept the basic premise - that a false positive (or negative) is always possible. Look at Ricco's statement that he took CERA and should have been caught multiple times, but wasn't. Hence we run multiple tests and develop (now, at least) a longitudinal profile of an athlete. So any 'aberrant' values will appear over time and can be tracked without jumping to conclusions over one single test on one sole sample. Even better (or complementary) is the idea for certain pre-identified markers to be identified or inserted into drugs as "tags" that can be easily identified.

So will Landis take this as more evidence for his side of the case, or has he simply agreed to disagree and move on? If he is innocent, what of the human cost here? Are we doing the right thing with these so-called drug "cheats" or are we making what could be unemotional technical points highly emotive and "charged" with guilt, suspicion and pain - and thus feeding the media monster instead of protecting the athletes?

Giro hero Sella caught out

It doesn't take too much to get noticed by the wrong people. Win a few stages, especially in a dramatic way and you can make a real name for yourself. And get 'targeted' by the drug cops.

Winner of three stages and the climber's competition of the Giro d'Italia, Italian Emanuele Sella, has been found positive in an out-of-competition doping control issued by the International Cycling Union (UCI) on July 23, according to La Gazzetta dello Sport. The 27 year-old from Vicenza was found to have used the same third generation EPO – CERA (Continuous Erythropoietin Receptor Activator) – that Riccardo Riccò admitted to using in the Tour de France. 

Ricco, now Sella. It's certainly a good advert for CERA. It works. 

Ricco takes Pantani too literally

Self-confessed Pantani fan with a 'naturally high' haematocrit has seemingly been caught out. And is thus out of Le Tour and into police custody. What can one say? Beltran at least was at the end of his career... what was Ricco thinking?

Italian rider Riccardo Riccò of Saunier Duval has tested positive for blood booster Erythropoietin (EPO), French sports daily L'Equipe reported on its website on Thursday. According to the paper's Damien Ressiot, one of the climber's urine samples collected by the French Anti-Doping Agency AFLD showed traces of a third generation EPO called CERA (Continuous Erythropoietin Receptor Activator).

Of course he could be innocent. Of course.