Lance Armstrong explains to Bill Maher how it's easy to cheat with EPO and not test positive

So inspirational. I need to get my hands on this stuff!

With that short a half-life, you could dose right up to the start of a long stage and be clean by the time you got to the doping control trailer. For a marathon, get up early to dose and eat breakfast and you will be "clean" by the time you finish.

Medical miracles never cease!

And we have threads that pose questions about whether one world record holder or another is clean?

LMAO.

Yes. We already know that at least since Ashenden's paper, and the Saginova case, plus Tucker's explanations of the Kiprop case.

Okay dumb question but how does EPO work? Does it cause any longer term physiological changes? Or does it only "work" when it's coursing through your veins?

Obviously, if you take EPO and train, you will get benefits from the higher quality training that outlast the drug being in your system.

But a short half life does not mean the substance is undetectable a day later, for example.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Current markers of the Athlete Blood Passport do not flag microdose EPO doping - PubMed

The Athlete Blood Passport is the most recent tool adopted by anti-doping authorities to detect athletes using performance-enhancing drugs such as recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO). This strategy relies on detecting ab...

Open link

Ten subjects were given twice weekly intravenous injections of rhEPO for up to 12 weeks.
The sensitivity of the passport to flag abnormal deviations in blood values was evaluated using dedicated Athlete Blood Passport software.

Our treatment regimen elicited a 10% increase in total haemoglobin mass equivalent to approximately two bags of reinfused blood.

The passport software did not flag any subjects as being suspicious of doping whilst they were receiving rhEPO.

Smart people already knew this and they also know a litany of the elites are doping amd getting away with it. Obvious dopers include Kipchoge, Kiptum, all the recent women's WR breakers, Cheptegai, Kiplimo, Katir, JakobIng, etc.

EPO increases the production of red blood cells, which last roughly 90 days.

And despite the short half-life, when they reviewed the samples from an earlier tour, 1998 I believe, 3/4 of the participants tested positive. This leads me to believe that almost all high level performers in the endurance space are using.

Yep. It is virtually undetectible if you have any competence in doping. And it is rocket fuel. The same goes for micro-dosed steroids. Houlihan was tested 180 times before getting caught on a fluke. The people that get caught are clumsy, arrogant or they are macrodosing. Here again, nothing that is too good to be true in endurance sports is real. Not hard to discern if you are looking for it with eyes open.

Correct. But it works well with controlled dosages (see link above). Athletes can use the 7 hours window at night for loading up, which is almost twice the half time of EPO.

So if the detection limit is x, the athletes can safely use the equivalent of 2x at 11 pm, and will be "clean" by 6 am.

Of course it helps to be in a team that does its own blood and urine work. Then you can start with, say 20 IU/kg EPO at 11 pm, get internally tested at 6 am, and then adjust the dosage accordingly next time 2 - 3 days later, test again and so forth until you have reached a reproducibly safe yet sufficient dosage.

All old knowledge of course, which is why this system is working so well.

so first you've heard of it?

Jakob Ing isnt taking epo. Sandnes isnt america. He is taking asthma drugs without having asthma.

Henrik Ing used to have a machine in the locker room that made weird noises, to inhale the asthma drugs more efficiently before the races.

Lance was completely shafted. Return his ‘official’ TDF victories. All he beat know it was a fair contest. Bitches.

That won’t work if they test you before the race. Curfew time is typically 11-6, isn’t it?

... a nebulizer?

But I was reading from rekrunner and that Renato dude that doping doesn't work? EPO is real??!!

They make a lot of money out of pim.ping out dopers.