Could an athlete then be disciplined simply for performing too well?
That would be unfair, says Tucker. The final verdict is only ever going to be reached by testing. It has to be. In recent years, cycling authorities have successfully prosecuted athletes for having anomalous blood profiles, even when banned substances such as EPO could not be found. But performance is too far removed from taking a banned substance and influenced by too many outside factors to convict someone of doping, Tucker says. When we look at this young swimmer from China who breaks a world record, thats not proof of anything. It asks a question or two.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.11109
Doesnt a clean drug test during competition rule out the possibility of doping?
No, says Ross Tucker, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Athletes are much more likely to dope while in training, when drug testing tends to be less rigorous. Everyone will pass at the Olympic games. Hardly anyone fails in competition testing, Tucker says.
Out-of-competition tests are more likely to catch dopers, he says, but it is not feasible to test every elite athlete regularly year-round. Tracking an athlete over time and flagging anomalous performances would help anti-doping authorities to make better use of resources, says Yorck Olaf Schumacher, an exercise physiologist at the Medical University of Freiburg in Germany, who co-authored a 2009 paper proposing that performance profiling be used as an anti-doping tool1. I think its a good way and a cheap way to narrow down a large group of athletes to suspicious ones, because after all, the result of any doping is higher performance, Schumacher says.
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