[quote]wiggles wrote:
And from what I understand, Contador’s positive was in the midst of about 14 other administered tests within a very short time frame. I’ll be interested to see how they explain the fact that he tested positive in one test (somewhere around 7 or 8 in the lineup) but yet none of the other drug screens picked up this amount of Clen.
For those not familiar with professional cycling, this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. Most accept that these guys dope on some level; the Spanish just seem to be less efficient at covering it up. In recent years, nearly an entire Spanish team was banned after someone snitched and they found a whole bag of the syringes and empty bottles used on the cyclists in the trainer’s bus.
PED’s have been in the sport for a while. People are always trying to bust Lance, and yet he has conveniently never been caught. I respect what he did, but there’s a solid chance he just had PED’s they could not pick up yet. Testing for these drugs (at least in cycling) always seems to be at least 4 or 5 years behind the advancement of the PED’s themselves.
Who knows, but I agree with Gregron, either change the rules or let the stuff be legal. Just cause I start taking PED’s doesn’t mean I’m gonna be able to put my ass on a bike and ride over mountains and shit and win a 2000 mile bike race in 21 days.[/quote]
Whats more, the positive test was 4 days before the race ended, after Contador had almost completely locked it up. Wouldn’t be much of a point taking clen at that stage. And certainly no point in taking a really, really tiny amount as indicated by the amount in the test. I’m not sure what 50 picograms/ml in the urine corresponds to dosage-wise, but it doesn’t seem like much.
Cattle farmers, as it turns out, cheat too.
I had a discussion on this elsewhere, and did a LEXIS search of major Euro newspapers (english only) and found a ton of confirmed cases of clen being used in the cattle industry there, despite the EU ban on it in cattle. “ban” is a strong word here, since the EU authorities allow .1 microgram/kg of clenbuterol in meat before it’s a problem. It’s perfectly legit to use in pork and horses, so it’s relatively easy to get. They don’t test every single piece of meat, obviously, and based on those news stories there are farmers that use quite a bit more clen than they’re allowed to hoping not to get caught.
based on the apparent prevalence of its use in cattle, the tiny amount in Contador’s test and over a dozen clean tests in the preceding 2 weeks, it seems like the “food contamination” excuse is plausible.