Sunday Schooling

Daily News

The TBV STATUS REVIEW has been updated, and adds "rumours and speculation" and "things I'm wondering about" sections. The KEY REFERENCES have been updated too.

Cooke's team manager, would "like to kill Floyd Landis with his bare hands".

Get Fuzzy, comic strip addresses Floyd, from comics.com

Best Recent Interview with Floyd, from Aug 8 San Diego Union Tribune, from that burst of visibility. Clarifies some things for me -- he's only gotten one page AAF reports, is expecting final reports; assumes retirement if banned. Thinks there are many ways to sabotage, but can't speculate exactly how.

More WADA and Lab Information

WADA Annual reports, 2002-2005 are organizational and financial, and don't say much if anything interesting about tests and AAFs.

WADA Lab Statistics from 2005, still looking for earlier. This report includes gross comparisons to previous years. Some reported results of interest:

Total 183,337 tests, 3909 AAFs, 2.13%
Paris 9,257 tests, 491 AAFs, 5.30%
UCLA 39,775 tests, 538 AAFs, 1.35%
Warsaw 1,698 tests, 112 AAFs, 6.60%
Lisbon 3,302 tests, 162 AAFs, 4.91%
Ghent 5,378 tests, 223 AAFs, 4.15%
Barcelona 3,365 tests, 72 AAFs, 2.14%

The single dirtiest sport (warning, small sample size) was Billiards, with 28 AAFs in 281 tests, almost 10%. Who would have thunk that?

Of the 3909 AAFs, 1864 (43%) were steroid related, in which testosterone falls; testosterone accounted for 1,132 AAFs (60.7%) of the steroids, or 28.9% of the total AAFs.

It isn' t stated how many of those 1,132 were confirmed by IRMS/CIR, or whether IRMS was used to confirm any other types of AAF.

[Corrected below - I originally multiplied by the 28.9%, oops]

Breaking down the steroid results by lab, following the previous list, and then my taking 60.7% to project the testosterone AAFs, we get:

Total 1864 steroid, ~1131 testosterone,
Paris 169 S, ~103 T
UCLA 243 S,~148 T
Warsaw 86 S, ~52 T
Lisbon 97 S, ~59 T
Ghent 92, S, ~56 T
Barcelona 37 S, ~22 T

It is notable that Paris has 5% of all AAFs, but 10% of the steroid AAFs. This raises questions whether their sample set is dirtier than that of other labs, the other labs aren't as good, or they are doing something wrong.

[added] If all these T-AAFs were IRMS/CIR confirmed, that would be a lot of data validating the CIR. We don't know how many were validated, or how many led to sanctions.

WADA Out-of-Competition statistic reports for 2000-2005

2000, 2500 total tests, 175 cycling, no AAF data
2001, 3629 total tests, 44 cycling, no AAF data
2002, 4561 total, cycling 167 urine, 40 blood; no AAF data
2003, 4229 total, cycling242 urine, 0 blood; no AAF data

(2004 added EPO testing).

2004, 1804 urine, 101 blood, 378 EPO; cycling 128/5/93; no AAF data

(2005 T/E changes from 6:1 to 4:1, added tranfusion and HgH tests);

2005 3114 urine, 2114 EPO, 134 transfusion; cycling 168/132/15; no AAF data

Comparing AAFs to Sanctions

An interesting point is that there seem to be many more AAFs than there are sanctions. Thus, something is happening in the "results management" phase that is deciding many AAFs are really not a problem.

Discussion about this in Triathlon, at SlowTritch, with Floyd reference, wonders what is going on.

For example, USADA reports cited in Wednesday's Roundup show about 27 athletes AAF-ed on testosterone from 2001-2005, but the values given by WADA for the UCLA lab above say there were 70 in 2005 alone. This doesn't seem to make sense, so what's going on?

[updated 7-Sep 12:30]