Be it doping in sport, hot topics like Caster Semenya or Oscar Pistorius, or the dehydration myth, we try to translate the science behind sports and sports performance. Consider a donation if you like what you see here!
So as expected, CAS today overturned the BOA policy of issuing a lifetime ban for any athlete who has served a doping ban longer than six months. This is hardly unexpected, and is a decision that probably owes much to the legal backdrop of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA’s) policy which issues a two-year ban […]
I’m pretty sure that by now, most of you have read the following news, in which L’Equipe has obtained a confidential document from the UCI in which all the riders in the 2010 Tour de France have been scored on a scale from 0 to 10 based on their biological passport data (I’ve copied the […]
One last short post, just to give a bit of significant news in the world of cycling. It is significant in that it boosts the efforts of the biological passport even further, and it is significant because it follows on from a series of posts we did just over a month ago on the biological […]
Having expounded the , a slightly more down-to-earth deviation today to just mention two recent cases where professional cyclists have been exonerated despite failing doping controls for clenbuterol. The cyclists, Rudi van Houts and Phillip Nielsen, failed tests last year, including the testing of B-samples, but were recently cleared of any wrongdoing, based on their defense that the […]
Floyd Landis may well already have gone down in history as one of sport’s most polarizing figures. A year ago, he was merely a disgraced Tour champion, the first man to have the Tour title officially stripped as a result of a positive doping test. Then a series of leaked emails, a Wall Street Journal […]
In a bizarre series of events, the Spanish cycling federation has cleared Tour de France champion Alberto Contador, and exonerated him of any doping charges. He is therefore free to race immediately.The verdict, which was until yesterday a “proposal” was announced by Spanish news yesterday and confirmed today. You can read the coverage in English at […]
Yesterday, a reader sent me a link for an article from the Telegraph newspaper, titled “Rugby Union players are exonerated while cyclists take the blame. How is that fair?” Ordinarily, articles from the Telegraph are thought-provoking, accurate and praise-worthy. This was not one of them. The article concerns the recent one-year suspension handed to Alberto Contador, and the exoneration […]
Yesterday we gave the award for Drug of the Year to methylhexanamine, or DMAA, for its repeat appearances in the latter half of the year, and the interesting debate is stimulates over supplement use. The unlucky “loser” there was clenbuterol, a drug which rocketed into the news at the end of September when it burst […]
It may seem peculiar to have a drug win an award in our Year in Review Series, but this is elite sport, and the only guarantee is that every year, doping will feature heavily in the sports science news. This year, there were two “nominees” for the Drug of the year category: Clenbuterol was an […]