How did Lance beat the drug tests?

Some strategies:

Use doping agents that cannot be detected. Blood doping. HGH. Insulin. EPO before 2001.

Use agents that are unknown to authorities or are not known to be used yet in competition. Designer steroids. Artificial hemoglobin. PFCs.

Use detectable agents in doses that do not trigger a positive test result. Testosterone. Microdosing with EPO. This is helped because the test thresholds are usually high enough that a positive is only triggered if you are using massive amounts of the stuff.

Use masking agents. Like bringing up your epitestosterone level so your testosterone-epitestosterone ratio is within the negative range.

Pay bribes or in some way get tips from insiders at the UCI so you know when "random" tests will be conducted.

Have UCI officials or race organizers sweep the matter under the rug or accept phonied up paperwork to excuse a negative finding.

Aside from that, the UCI has tradiitionally not been interested in stopping doping. It is only in the last couple of years that the UCI has decided that there is an economic reason to do anything. So it is not like the dopers had a real adversary looking to catch them.

He paid Dr Ferrari a lot of money for a reason.

Most dopers never get caught eg Millar, Pantani, Museeuw...
Those that do get caught are caught because of stuff ups or bad advice. Or like Armstrong, get semi-caught when a test is created later on for something that couldn't be tested for at the time of the race.

It is VERY easy to beat the system
For example:
1. micro-dosed Epo, growth hormone, actovegin can't be tested for
2. use other newer versions of steroids or stimulants that aren't yet being tested for
3. get a dodgey TUE for corticosteroids and salbutamol
4. pay Dr Ferrari etc loads of $$$ for autologous transfusion (& make sure they don't stuff up like Tyler's supplier)
5. take testosterone with the correct dose of epitestosterone (take note Floyd) so that the ratio is fine

Many more examples possible.

patch70 said:

5. take testosterone with the correct dose of epitestosterone (take note Floyd) so that the ratio is fine

Many more examples possible.

hillarious. floyd should have taken notes from this forum instead of the daily peloton forums. guess he was too busy having a beer and jack daniels....

vitamin s said:

hillarious. floyd should have taken notes from this forum instead of the daily peloton forums. guess he was too busy having a beer and jack daniels....

Someone [censored] up is all. Hamilton got caught because, most likely, someone forgot to clean out the transfusion machine and his blood transfusion was contaminated with traces of the previous guys. It'd be fecking hillarious if it wasn't so pathetic.

LA beat the drug tests the same way the rest of the top riders beat them.

steve26 said:

It seems that everyone on here is convinced that Lance doped. Or for that matter that most of the peloton is doping.

How is it they can dope without the tests picking up the results?

I mean Landis was busted....how is it then that Lance was never busted (not talking about 1999) but wouldn't they have seen results in the tests over all those years?

If you think it is impressive that someone beat doping control then I'm afraid you don't know much about doping.

steve26 said:

It seems that everyone on here is convinced that Lance doped. Or for that matter that most of the peloton is doping.

How is it they can dope without the tests picking up the results?

I mean Landis was busted....how is it then that Lance was never busted (not talking about 1999) but wouldn't they have seen results in the tests over all those years?

I believe on his innocence 😉

mareblu said:

I believe on his innocence 😉

Same it's simple how he beat it. He just didn't dope!!

Bro Deal said:

Some strategies:

Use doping agents that cannot be detected. Blood doping. HGH. Insulin. EPO before 2001.

Use agents that are unknown to authorities or are not known to be used yet in competition. Designer steroids. Artificial hemoglobin. PFCs.

Use detectable agents in doses that do not trigger a positive test result. Testosterone. Microdosing with EPO. This is helped because the test thresholds are usually high enough that a positive is only triggered if you are using massive amounts of the stuff.

Use masking agents. Like bringing up your epitestosterone level so your testosterone-epitestosterone ratio is within the negative range.

Pay bribes or in some way get tips from insiders at the UCI so you know when "random" tests will be conducted.

Have UCI officials or race organizers sweep the matter under the rug or accept phonied up paperwork to excuse a negative finding.

Aside from that, the UCI has tradiitionally not been interested in stopping doping. It is only in the last couple of years that the UCI has decided that there is an economic reason to do anything. So it is not like the dopers had a real adversary looking to catch them.

I must agree with you here, in that Science is always lightyears ahead of regulation and even more so of enforcement.

It's not doping if it's not on the "banned list"
It's not doping if there is no test for what's being used.
It's not doping if what's being used isn't even known except for a select few.
It's not doping if hardly anyone can even agree on how much you must test positive for it to equate to doping.
It's not doping if a doctor says you need it or else you will die.

In the meantime... the rest of us are taken for fools.

As Bruyneel mentioned, no USPS/DC cyclist has tested positive while on that team in the last ten years :p That's because they are clean.

musette said:

As Bruyneel mentioned, no USPS/DC cyclist has tested positive while on that team in the last ten years :p That's because they are clean.

Armstrong did. Six positives for EPO in retrotested urine.

They're all doing it. Look at the riders being caught today: Ullrich, Heras, Landis, Millar, Hamilton, Museeuw... these aren't amateurs moving up or fading stars trying to recover the glory days, they're the cream of the crop, at their peak when they were nailed. Two GT winners nailed in the last three years. How much brighter does that neon sign have to be?

An ugly choice to make, endanger your health to win, but if the authorities had taken doping seriously after Festina, the riders wouldn't have to make the choice between doping or getting out of cycling.

musette said:

As Bruyneel mentioned, no USPS/DC cyclist has tested positive while on that team in the last ten years :p That's because they are clean.

Andreu

that's funny how almost every top rider in the past 10 years, worked extensively with ferrari or checchini (lance with ferrari), and how both doc's are openly known as the top dopers in the world.

What bothers me most is not so much that riders ar getting caught. It's the fact that there are many many other individuals involved. Look people, this isn't something that you can do by walking into your family health clinic and say

um... Doc... I need something that will boost my energy and performance at work... what can you prescribe for me???

Oh... sure... here's a prescription for some EPO to help oxygen absorbtion and HGH to help you recover when you're feeling down.

BS!!!!

Doctors, Coaches, Team Managers and Agent's are involved. It's a complicated program that requires people wearing lab coats and sophisicated equipment. It bother's me how nobody is talking. There's a code of silence in the peloton, and one of its most fearsome enforcers was and is Lance Armstrong. Why??? WTF is he protecting? WTF is he hiding?

Let's not kid ourselves. Professional competitive sports is ALL ABOUT performance enhancement. The whole point is getting a leg up on your rivals. Lighter bikes, power training, lactate threshold, wind tunnel testing, periodization, wearing a heartrate monitor, altitude training, blood doping, steroids, EPO, etc... etc... where does one draw the line and call it cheating.

musette said:

As Bruyneel mentioned, no USPS/DC cyclist has tested positive while on that team in the last ten years. That's because they are clean.

You seem to forget Lance's positive test for corticosteroids in the 1999 Tour. As well as the 6 +ve Epo tests.

Very selective memory you have.

musette said:

As Bruyneel mentioned, no USPS/DC cyclist has tested positive while on that team in the last ten years. That's because they are dodgey.

What is truly unbelievable is that those riders that tested positive after leaving USPS/DSC did not actually get any faster when they changed teams and apparently started using dope for the first time. In fact many got slower. And a rider like Contador who was doping with Dr Fuentes & Saiz, has gotten better since joining DSC.

You'd have thought that the ~20% benefit that doping provides would make them considerably faster on those other dirty teams.

We must all have it wrong. Dope is actually performance-detracting. Either that or musette and Bruyneel are liars.

AS for endangering your health I can tell you that you run a higher risk smoking marijuana and getting drunk every weekend than taking EPO fro the Tour de France.

patch70 said:

What is truly unbelievable is that those riders that tested positive after leaving USPS/DSC did not actually get any faster when they changed teams and apparently started using dope for the first time. In fact many got slower. And a rider like Contador who was doping with Dr Fuentes & Saiz, has gotten better since joining DSC.

You'd have thought that the ~20% benefit that doping provides would make them considerably faster on those other dirty teams.

On the contrary... Hamilton became quite a bit stronger after he left Postal. Rode most of the Tour with a broken collarbone, finished fourth, and won a Tour stage, when he was with CSC. Plus, he won an Olympic gold medal when he was with Phonak. Landis? Turned into a real powerhouse when he went to Phonak. 'Won' the Tour, with not much of a team behind him. Heras 'won' the Vuelta when he was with Liberty. Granted, these were strong riders that were relegated to a secondary role at Postal/DSC, but they certainly didn't slow down when they left. They seemed to show a substantial leap in performance.

I'm not saying Postal/DSC was lilly white clean. They're all dirty. However, it was CSC that Basso was riding for when he may have been visiting Fuentes, and T-Mobile's doctors have fallen under serious suspicion, while their top rider appears to have been blood doping. DSC is hardly the root of all evil.