B. Lafferty wrote:
>
> And all Tyler has to do is come up with medical proof that he is in fact a
> chimera. AFAIK, he hasn't mentioned that as a possibility--just the
> unspecified surgical intervention. So let him have another blood test done
> for homologous blood doping around Christmas time. If he's negative for
> Christmas, he gets a two year suspension.
>
>
My position since the day the story broke (
http://tinyurl.com/4mw8q )
was taking Tyler's coment about a surgically necessary transfusion at
face value. I couldn't beleive that he actually wanted anyone to
beleive that he had a run-of-the-mill surgery (not quite run-of-the-mill
if things go so wrong that you need a homologous transfusion...lots of
planned surgeries use autologous transfusions as well as spilled blood
harvesting techniques specifically to minimize the use of homologous
transfusion, saving the donated blood for real emergencies). And to
recover from such a surgery that was close enough to the date of the
tests such that the transfusion could be detected (assuming that the
transfusion was run-of-the-mill and that the red cells would be
cleared), yet far enough away from the any of the races...where he
decimated the field at Romandie, get second in the Dauphine, won the
Olympic TT and won Stage 8 of the Vuelta.
The only thing I could think of at the time was a rare long term
chimerism from the transfusion (the word escaped me at the time) and
that if he was telling the truth, he would always "fail" the test.
Warren posted links about chimerism and that brought to light that even
if Tyler did or didn't get a transfusion, there are people that walk
around with two different types of blood (not all of them are sick,
either, as someone here keeps saying...it's true, there are a bunch of
cases where people have certain autoimmune diseases and it was found out
that often they were chimeric, but not all chimeras are sick, and not
all the people with Lupus (or whatever) are chimeras)
Lots of people were quick to say "never", and "impossible". My favorite
chemistry professor used to say, "don't trust people that use words like
never, always, impossible or absolutely". So my attention tends to
wander whenever I read or hear those words.
The most striking fact is that since the first knee jerk excuse of "I
had a transfusion once for a surgery, I think.", there hasn't been a
single re-statement of that, or any suggestion from Tyler or Phonak that
he be tested again, which is what I would have done if I knew I didn't
accept a transfusion. All we've seen (and we only see it through the
press) is that Phonak is trying to take the legal and moral low-road by
challenging the validity of the test in order to get the results thrown
out. I presume it's in their legal best interest to keep quiet about
the re-testing, and maybe they are doing it behind closed doors, cuz
what the ****, he's probably guilty and if it is a suprise to Phonak
that Tyler was transfusing, they want to know as bad as we do.