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.