Wednesday Roundup

News
SI keeps snarking. When SI turns on someone, it is not nice -- for instance, this notorious hit-piece on Michael Andretti when he was getting jobbed by McLaren in 1993. (Teammate Ayrton Senna said Andretti had been treated "shabbily".)

CyclingNews wraps up the Saris/Madison fundraiser.

VeloNews letters offer the outline of a conspiracy theory for Patrick O'Grady to embellish.

Blogs
An amusing (if somewhat jaded) visual comment on FL from Cartoonsbychris. Not a bad caricature if you like those things....pk

Rant deplores black and white polarization, and bemoans the lack of critical thinking in all walks.

South African blog goes a little snarky on Oct 17. TBV corrects him.

Calendar
Arnie Baker is said to be preparing Slide Set 2.0 to be presented at the Tour de Tucson. There was an anonymous rumour about this a while back, and it's a stronger rumour now. The event is Saturday, Nov 17, but we don't know when/where the presentation will be.

Web
Looking for Tucson news with Baker and Landis, we find this amusing report of the event from 1997:

After the break was caught, a tandem with mountain biker Floyd Landis and Arnie Baker jumped away, with Bostick right on their wheel. That was it...the race was made. The tandem dropped Bostick and put almost 5 minutes on him by the finish. One minute back, there was a sprint for third with Dutchman Patrick Eyk (Shaklee) outsprinting Steve Hegg (Saturn) for third. Local rider Ryan McKean (CDS Software) got fifth, Robbie Ventura (Navigators) was sixth and Tour de France stage winner Jeff Pierce got seventh.

What I want to know is who the stoker was on that tandem. Chris Horner featured as well, before a flat.

Forums
At DPF, the "tests digested for dummies" thread has reached the conclusion of its initial impetus with rational head's (RH) final detailed post. The key posts are #1, #8, #22, #25, #33, #34, and #52.. The wiki has not yet kept pace.

He's explicitly refused to be drawn into making explicit conclusions based on what he thinks so far.

RH has also so far refused to be clearly drawn into discussing the implications of Landis's cortisone on measurements that were using cortisone metabolites as reference compounds. He's been insisting that there is no pathway for the cortisone to metabolize into testosterone, and that the lab would have been dumb to have not considered the interference. This still remains insufficiently explored. RH has said,

Again. If the lab saw cortisol or its metabolites (natural or synthetic) in Floyd's sample (the instrument measuring it is called GC-MS, gas chromatographer-mass spectrometer) and IF it was in ANY detectable amounts (regardless of whether it was above or below 30ng/mL threshold) they could easily tell it apart from testosterone or its metabolites in the same urine sample assay. The lab has many options to further investigate these cortisols/metabolites if they wish to or have some questions - from more accurate confirmation assay on another sample (it would quantify each cortisol metabolite then) or they could run IRMS on it - to confirm its exogenesis. In either case, they would target cortisol metabolites completly and totally separate from the testosterone metabolites. Unlike what was suggested earlier, I highly doubt that the lab would be dumb enough to take an exogenous cortisol metabolite and use it for investigation of T exogenesis because cortisol is literally "screaming at you" when you compare it to testosterone on GC-MS. Only a complicit or totally incompetent lab would do such a thing! I don't think our DP experts (besides my own sneak review) found anything like that on USADA sheets.

while in another thread, at post #40, we hear:

Umm, LNDD did detect cortisol in Floyd's urine; a concentration of (edit) 143ng/mL - look at USADA0057 which is the mass hormone screening of vial 2 178/07 995474 H. The chromatogram for the cortisol (either 632.6 m/z or 636.6 m/z I can't tell) is in USADA0058. At least in the duplicate.

Now for vial 11 USADA0054 they have reported a cortisol concentration of 0ng/mL and I think this is where you are coming from. If you look at the chromatogram though USADA0055 there is a great big peak with the retention time of cortisol ~22.85min. Now I could be reading these incorrectly but it seems to me that the peaks are there in both but for some reason, which someone might be able to explain only the vial 2 sample had the peak area calculated.

I should point out that the two chromatograms look quite different - more peaks in the second one and I'm not sure whether the two samples were prepared in the same manner.

Edit: The results sheet USADA0057 has a list of concentrations that would trigger further action so >200ng/mL for T or E for example. But does not have one for cortisol. Why? 143ng/mL would be enough to trigger a positive result without a TUE. Actually having just read this wada doc the 30ng/ml limit is not the threshold for a positive but is the reasonable limit for detection the lab must demonstrate (like the 2ng/mL for [T] or [E]). Maybe they are the same . . . there isn't a seperate threshold for the glucocorticosteroids - and I can't seem to find another value elsewhere.

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