of some interest, from cyclingnews.com
Failure of cycling press
The final scandal of the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City involving cross country skiers and the use of the drug darbepoetin illuminates the facade of reporting currently practiced in the cycling world. Headlines in VeloNews, Cyclingnews, and other cycling periodicals blare that the trial of Dr. Michele Ferrari is an attempt for "cycling to come clean" - what a joke. The fact is that the "big drug" that is being discussed at the trial and in the cycling press, EPO, only confirms that the cycling federations, and more importantly, the cycling press is not interested in really exposing the doping that is going on in the peloton.
The use of EPO in cycling is at least a decade and a half old - have no other drugs with performance enhancing attributes been developed by pharmaceutical companies? The cycling press would have us believe so, yet, we have to hear about dabepoetin from NBC or CNN, the most generic of news sources, instead of the specialist cycling reporters and editors that our subscription and advertising dollars are paying for.
It's easy to sympathize with the cycling press, however, because doping is bad for the industry that they are dependent upon so they, like the team sponsors, turn a blind eye to doping until someone gets caught. This strategy unfortunately will result in a cycling fan base that will turn away from racing and towards the mellower, recreational aspects of cycling. At a time when cycling is poised to take on a higher level of visibility in areas outside of Europe, the upcoming reports of fraud and scandal could disastrously set cycling back another 20 years.
It is interesting to note that even when the cycling press reports about that old stablehorse, EPO, not too many questions are asked. The new EPO testing procedures were calmly accepted by the press as a "major step towards cleaning up the sport" with very little follow up. The questions that should have been asked are: how does the test detect EPO? [through detection of chemical tags inserted in the EPO] What if there were no chemical tags in the EPO?
Rumors have reached even the navel-gazing United States that there are chemical tag-free batches of EPO available from sources in Eastern Europe, thus nullifying the new EPO test. There have been rumors of other drugs like darbepoetin for years, but none of these drugs are mentioned or investigated by the press to any visible degree. Is the cycling press telling us that they have no friends in the peleton that they can talk to about these allegations? What about the recently retired riders who are pursuing careers outside of cycling? What about the American cyclists who are literally infiltrating the peleton in increasing numbers? Can we find no one to talk even anonymously about their new experiences and the new pressures that they must be under, to take the injections or get out of the race? Are idolized riders only "technically" telling the truth: "I don't dope" meaning "I don't take anything that's _currently_ on the banned list".
Until the cycling press starts asking these hard questions and getting some real answers, we can only be so enthusiastic about reading the race reports - there are too many questions in the back of everyone's mind.
Tom Lewis
Monday, February 25, 2002
Respond to this letter
Cyclingnews editor Jeff Jones replies
Cyclingnews has always reported on illegal drug use in the peloton. You may remember the Festina scandal in 1998? We had the most detailed and up to date reports on the web. Since then we have continued to report on new drugs and drug tests, and there is no pressure from advertisers not to, although some readers complain that it's interfering with the cycling coverage. I don't think you can describe us as "not interested".
I have always criticised the French EPO urine test, as it only has a 3 day window, whereas the effects of EPO lasts for weeks. The criticism started in 1999/2000 when the test was developed for use in the Olympics. I'll leave it up to you read through the articles via our archives
http://www.cyclingnews.com/archives.html and search tool (google.com works quite well for that).
Explanations of how the test works are given on more than one occasion. The EPO test relies on the fact that there are slight differences between artificial and natural EPO, although there is no specific chemical tag inserted into artificial EPO to make it detectable. Other parameters in : the person's blood profile also change when the balance is upset, and blood tests are used by the UCI to confirm an EPO suspect.
EPO may not even the drug of choice any more, but a number of people tested positive for it last year. People still test positive for steroids too.
As for NESP, two examples last year (scroll down the page a bit):
http://www.cyclingnews.com/results/2001/oct01/oct10news.php http://www.cyclingnews.com/results/2001/nov01/nov13news.php
There was also a debate about it in the cyclingnews letters page last year.
NESP may be a more powerful drug than EPO, but it is purely artificial and has a half life three times as long, so it is easier to detect.
Finally, yes there are plenty of rumours about the drugs going around in the peloton. To print whatever we hear would be rather irresponsible.
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