I agree with some of what you’re saying. I have no idea if she’s innocent or guilty, but they were forced to argue the way they did because of the way the WADA technical document is worded, IMO. Here are my comments:
1. I would say trace amount and they claim trace amount simply because the amount is far below what can be seen when injecting nandrolone. It is also far below what *can* be seen ingesting pig organs and meat as I describe below.
2.
3. I think they believe the jury is out because they haven’t seen it tested in distance runners. I’d certainly like to see the animal studies put to the test in elite distance runners.
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5. The study by Ayotte in 2008 (Steroids, 74:350-358) showed 300g of kidney, liver, heart mix led to max urine concentrations of 21.4 - 130ng/mL. Regular meat (300g) 0.6-2.4 ng/mL. The 300g tests above were from a mixture of castrated and uncastrated pigs. 100g of kidney led to 14.4 ng/mL. 100g of liver led to 1.9 ng/L. The 100g tests were from uncastrated pigs. These amounts are anywhere from 1/8 to 25 times what Houlihan measured. The problem with these small experimental groups is that the concentrations in urine can vary by as much as 6x even within these 3-person groups. Also, as the authors point out, the concentrations can vary quite a bit from animal to animal. It really doesn’t give us information about the true range in the population. It is very unlikely that 1-3 person groups with a small number of animals will show the max and mins in the general population.
6. I agree that castration is still the norm, but immunocastration is a more common way to not castrate, but remove the taint. Do we have any studies on these pigs? Also, castration is getting a bad rep, especially in Europe. I’d like to see current figures for the US and figures for the use of the Improvest chemical.
7. The one thing about BTC is that they appear to work athletes pretty hard and it takes extra time to get used to it. There are a lot of people who had jumps in the BTC group, but I doubt they are all dopers.