Italian court says it's "highly likely" an Olympic race walker's drug sample was tampered with to get him banned

My point is that when the labs have a moral and financial interest then you can throw ISO 17025 away.

I bet the labs you work with do not work behind an assumption that they don’t make mistakes.

Water blanks and contamination with standards and poor calibration.

In the Edwards case, I have read on this site ,they did over 50 separate analysis prior to finding one that suited them.

rule readerr wrote:

My point is that when the labs have a moral and financial interest then you can throw ISO 17025 away.

I bet the labs you work with do not work behind an assumption that they don’t make mistakes.

Water blanks and contamination with standards and poor calibration.

In the Edwards case, I have read on this site ,they did over 50 separate analysis prior to finding one that suited them.

I am not disagreeing. Certainly your first sentence is absolutely correct.

But i am just amazed that such a flawed business model can exist. do labs really exist just to do tests for wada, paid by wada; with no other model to expand or grow the business?

that is so deeply flawed, i would be amazed that any evidence used by such a lab would stand up to scrutiny in court.

it seems a slam dunk.

yes, we work under the assumption we can make mistakes and therefore work vigoruously to be able to prove we dont - we are terrified of our results being challenged and must be 100% confident we are correct. we care more about process than result. we genuinely dont care if the result is +ve or _ve, as long as we can be confident it is correct.

yes, we pay a lot of money for independently provided reliable calibration fluids etc,

we hate tests where the results are binary and on the limit of sensitivity - that makes no sense.

when i say we - i mean the good people i pay a lot of money to! The above is what they must prove to me, the customer. i use, investigate and approve labs all over the world. i have never looked to see if any do wada stuff. if i thought for a second that any of them were less than impartial i would drop them instantly.

oh dear;

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/science-medical/laboratories/accredited-laboratories

madness.

In the UK there were two labs, Kings College and Newmarket. The latter withdrew due to WADA restricting what they could do commercially.

WADA labs heads act as “independent “ advisors to hearing panels when other WADA labs are under scrutiny.

They try and take the view that analysis for WADA purposes is different from that used elsewhere and experts from the exterior world as dismissed as knowing nothing about drug testing in sport.

The central problem is the an assumption that WADA exists in its own world. This was driven by the cost and time implications of it being otherwise.All set out in the first WADA Code.

The title is misleading. The court did not say that it is "highly likely" but that it is ascertained with high degree of confidence.

About Italian courts... Their main flaw is that they are too slow but I don't think and I am not aware of any evidence that they make more mistakes than in other countries.

Please provide some if you have and not anecdotal (e.g. Amanda Knox) and based on biased journalist reports.

Again I repeat that WADA has been pulled up by a proper court and not ones based on supporting WADA .

No wonder WADA seems to be furious.

Will Doping Control be economically possible now?

thanks rule readerr. i am abslutey shocked. there is no way that would work in my industry.

the very phrase 'experts from outside w...knowing nothing about drug testing...' is a farce. the whole point of a scientific test is that any competent person can replicate it. any lab techician who knows the machine, knowns the extraction and calibraiton etc can repeat the test and get the same results - that is science. end of. nothing to do with sport.

and i imagine this all just gets accepted because at the end of the day it is a membership club that makes its own rules - if you dont like the rules, dont join.

i do have personal expereince of fake test results in italy - but that was steel radiographs - a totally different subject, but that whole project was bent as hell. i left in the end.

test cost is often set by demand and customer perception of value.

if a test is too expensive then it just needs to be done in bulk and the lab will work out a way or a standard to bring costs down to the customers ability to pay.

so i guess the research monopolised labs are fleecing wada who arent a profit making business i guess.

so for example, at my main lab, i pay $15 for an asbestos test. i get lots done. beause i am a good custmer with few positives, i pay the same for a screen test with a microscope using a simple standard as an indepth test with sem with a complicated standard- which should cost $80. the labs costs are internal - they pay machine, a salary and calibration fluids etc. they just profit from tests, they dont analyse costs per test so much. the lab has, ahem, 10 000 staff. they do a lot of tests.

many chemicals can be multi tested, but i still pay for each one since that is what the market expects. so i pay maybe $80 for one substance of 3 x $80 for three, but the machine is only run once whatever. we argue about this but that is the pricing structure, so i try to avoid such tests.

my rarest test is 'radiation', i hardly ever do that, so i pay north of $300 for it since the lab does so little of it too. if i did so many i could keep one machine and one lab guy busy all day, then the unit price would tumble. or we would find an easier test standard / method. I could probably take my 'radiation' tests to a specialist lab, but they would charge me $50 for asbestos and at a ratio of several thousand asbestos to each 'radiation', and wanting all done in one lab - the choice is obvious.

i can see that with drug testing there are hundreds of different substances.

this lookslike a nice, cosy little earner - they should open it up to the real world.

sdfjsdfjiosdfi wrote:

KAV wrote:

Remember that if you dope in Italy you make jail time, so the process is serious.

not really

Doping is a criminal offense, dumbo

Might not be an earner as the samples can be sent to the lowest priced lab and thus price competition.

Thus pressure on the standards applied.

But they just say” you can’t challenge our results “.

Can you imagine what the £100 million boxing fight chaps will make of the Italian case if there is a positive.

Don’t think UKAD can afford to test the next Fury Josiah fight.