Iban has been cleared of EPO use now... http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/cycling/7057146.stm L
"The federation said there had been a mistake with the first sample taken from the Saunier-Duval rider." B)!
A mistake. How can there have been a mistake!!? This is so bad. What sort of f***-up is this then. Its the sort of shite that will mean that every positive from now on will be contested and disputed. Leaving out sport with even more nonsense being dragged through the press.
some interesting stuff could come out of this The positive test result came from LNDD - the french lab that came under the spotlight during the Landis case. So although its a completely different type of test you can bet that Landis will be jumping on this one and trying to get as much mileage as possible. Im pretty sure I read somewhere that false negatives are much more likely than false positives - theres no clear black and white demarcation for a lot of these drug tests - judgement is based on the proteins in the blood looking like epo proteins - ie the patterns look like those that are formed when epo is taken. If there are abnormal patterns then these could well be epo but they can fall into 'most probably'* which is not quite the same as 'definitely'* and therefore with that element of doubt it comes back as a negative. So someone can have a 'definite' in their A sample and a 'most probably' in their B sample and that comes back as a negative. It would be a lot more transparent & interesting if the labs published percentages, likewise if a riders haematocrit was made public 6 months after they were tested. A lot of fans might want to know when their favourite rider records 49.9%hct day after day during a grand tour. Mayo is in good company - many other well known athletes have had to undergo the stress of an initial false positive A sample for PEDs- Marion Jones and Tyler Hamilton being the most famous.
How long before Floyd pipes up with 'I told you so'....??? More worrying, if he does, has he a point all of a sudden?
Floyd has zero point!!! it was well known in the peloton way before his test that he was a monster when it came to supercharged perfomances Also it turns out that things arent quite what they seem with mayo especially with his dodgy testosterone episode earlier in the year. And the Bsample result was a bit hasty too... UCI are now requesting that the B Sample be retested at LNDD, the french lab who identified a positive A sample, who incidentally did the original pioneering tests into EPO detection and are considered the leaders in EPO testing. http://www.lequipe.fr/Cyclisme/breves2007/20071023_130131Dev.html (my french is crap so it could actually be saying something else) Maybe Mayo was one of the 'men in black' that Mcquaid was determined to catch earlier in the year and thats why he is gunning for him?
Alternatively it could be argued that the standards of the Ghent lab and Australian lab are not as good as the flagship LNDD which is why they were unable to get any result at all out of it. I doubt FL will see it like that though!!!
