Katusha's Colom caught out by blood passport, A-sample suggests EPO

Not-so-funny coincidences: first Pfannberger gets caught out, then the Katusha 5X salary penalty contract is proposed, now Colom is pinged for an A-sample.

Team Katusha's Antonio Colom has been provisionally suspended by the UCI following a positive test for recombinant EPO. The sport's governing body announced Tuesday that Colom returned the positive test following an out-of-competition control on April 2, 209. He was targeted for additional controls using information from his blood profile and his race schedule, the UCI said.

Awaiting the B-sample, par for the course. Apparently another blood-profiling success story, if the UCI is to be believed. The team expresses "surprise". How about you - are you surprised?

Follow Armstrong's haematocrit online

Well it's meaningless really, but there you go: Detailed blood test results from seven International Cycling Union (UCI) and Damsgaard out-of-competition tests are now posted on www.livestrong.com.

It goes up and down, often without any particular reason (it has its own reasons, I guess). Mine is 46, or was when last tested. I still couldn't beat Lance over any distance, especially so with my Achilles injury!

And why meaningless? Well it has some meaning, especially if verified by an outside, independent body. We are however reading a public report and trusting that's it's verifiable. I don't think it would get published if it wasn't true, but it's still built on that trust. Would it get published if a value went over an accepted limit? We may never know, but it's something to wonder about.

And does it matter? Transparency may matter, however the ups and downs of a blood test result are fairly obscure unless you know how to read the details, understand the impact of workload and diet and take it in a longitudinal context. Most of us will just go, uh-huh. Or we will misinterpret something and start some sort of rumour...

Blood profiling and more

Interesting story of reconciliation (as well as blood profiling and the 'biological passport') here, between the UCI and ASO, respectively the world cycling governing body and the TdF organiser (via CN): The program, based on half a dozen blood analyses to determine each rider's blood profile, is considered by all parties (UCI, WADA and ASO) as a real weapon against blood doping. "We hope if it's successful in cycling that once we know it is successful, we'll use it in other sports after 2008," Pound said. The biological passport will not be compulsory at the start of all races but "the main ones". It will concern road riders only when it's put in place on January 1 and McQuaid added: "I'd like to think we'll do it in other disciplines than road possibly before the Olympics in Beijing."

It's not just cycling, is it?

First up, a mention for elite athlete gone bad, Olympic gold medal sprinter Marion Jones. Ooops. It's been a long time coming, hasn't it? We'd feel sorry, maybe, if she hadn't so stridently denied it.

Of course we Aussies often think or act like we are immune to the problem, but we are all in this together. From today's Sydney Morning Herald: A track-and-field athlete and a swimmer are among the 24 Australian sportspeople who recorded anti-doping violations in 2006-07. The list included nine athletes from weightlifting and body-building, along with seven rugby league players - mostly from the Queensland and NSW state league competitions.

In the long run it will become increasingly difficult to manage performance enhancement amongst all sports, not just cycling. Today we have the question of which drugs to include, and in what quantities. To identify the drugs is hard enough, and so instead we identify the blood-count variables and set acceptable limits. When an athlete's blood profile steps outside those parameters they are focused upon, questioned, tested or 'rested'. It's not perfect and many questions remain, such as 'what after all is normal', or 'what is safe'? Indeed, what really is performance-enhancing? Caffeine is on the list one moment, gone the next. Cortico-steroids? It depends who you ask.

And tomorrow we face genetic manipulation. Whilst DNA-profiling will certainly help, if an athlete is baselined after the manipulation has occurred then what changes will we see? Presumably none. So do we baseline athletes at junior level, or even earlier? No doubt we will also turn to the limit-setting, but what if genetic manipulation confounds that as well? If we can manipulate our genome to produce more strength or endurance we are surely able to engineer apparently 'normal' blood profiles. So what next do we do? Give in?