Substance abuse: October 2008 Archives

D'oh! Just when you thought you dodged an IOC bullet, the overseer of the Olympic Games announced yesterday that it will further analyze blood and urine samples collected from athletes at this summer's Beijing games. First on the retroactive testing list is Roche's long-acting red-cell booster Mircera.* But the IOC also warns that it will store the Beijing samples for 8 years to enable additional analyses when new drug tests become available.

In Beijing, 4770 doping tests were conducted on blood or urine, covering the period from July 27th to August 24th. But only 6 out of approximately 11,000 athletes suffered sanctions as a result of positive tests, an unexpected, low number (Table). Therefore the IOC will retest samples with a recently validated assay for Mircera. The announcement comes on the heels of news this week that 3 more Tour de France racers tested positively for the substance.

(IOC decisions regarding 3 other alleged Olympic doping cases, Belarussian hammer throwers Vadim Devyatovskiy and Ivan Tiskhan [testosterone] and Polish kayaker Adam Seroczynski [clenbuterol], are pending.)

* A pegylated version of recombinant erythropoietin.

Image of a freakishly bulked-up Lyudmila Blonska from Wikipedia.