CYCLING:Current UCI president Pat McQuaid has come under further pressure over the Lance Armstrong doping affair, with one of the UCI's previous biological passport experts claiming yesterday McQuaid "misled the public and media" over Armstrong's tests.
Dr Michael Ashenden, who was part of the UCI’s bio passport panel until early last year but who has since resigned has become one of the fiercest critics of the Irish president and the UCI’s relationship with Armstrong.
He contradicted McQuaid’s recent claim that suspicious blood samples given by Armstrong during 2009 and 2010 were all cleared by experts.
McQuaid made that assertion during a recent interview with the American website VeloNews. “He had something like 30 tests during the 24 months of his comeback. I’m not sure if all 30 were blood tests for the passport, but anyway, all of the tests were evaluated by independent experts, including, I think, Michael Ashenden.”
Felt sure
Ashenden questioned this statement and said that he felt sure he never had the chance to study the suspicious bio passport results. The UCI contradicted that this week, saying he had received some of Armstrong’s blood profile readings in May 2009. It sent Ashenden Armstrong’s previously-confidential code number so that the Australian could confirm that fact with his own records.
In response, Ashenden pointed out that the results identified as suspicious in the US Anti Doping Agency’s Reasoned Decision related to the 2009 and 2010 Tours de France, not that earlier period, and reiterated that he never got to assess the later block of data.
On Tuesday he publicly released that code number, enabling the other biological passport experts to check their own records. He called on those experts to each confirm whether or not they had been able to screen Armstrong, as McQuaid has claimed.
The UCI then backtracked on Tuesday evening, saying the initial screening had not thrown up any red flags and thus his blood results were not passed on.
Their statement was at variance with what McQuaid had claimed in the VeloNews interview, and drew a critical response from Ashenden.
“Whether the profile triggered the abnormality thresholds is a deliberate red herring planted by the UCI, and is misleading for two reasons,” he told The Irish Times yesterday.
“First, because McQuaid stated that the experts had reviewed “all” of Armstrong’s results. It is now clear that McQuaid’s statement was untrue, because the experts were only allowed to see the first nine of Armstrong’s 38 blood results.
“Specifically, it is now clear we were not shown Armstrong’s suspicious results during the Tour de France races.
Blood results
“Second, because the abnormality in Armstrong’s profile was a series of flat results, not spikes in blood values, the software was not engineered to detect that abnormality. it does become evident to an expert when reviewing the raw blood results.”
Ashenden’s point is that as these results were not passed on to the experts, that the UCI’s inaction ensured that Armstrong slipped through the net at the time.
He said if the UCI did not examine Armstrong’s raw data while placing third in the 2009 Tour, that it was “derelict in the obligations to faithfully run the passport on behalf of the riders, teams and race organisers who contribute 85 per cent of the costs of running the passport program”.
Bank on blood Wada president warns against complacency
World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) president John Fahey has warned against the dangers of "becoming complacent" in the global war on performance enhancing drugs, but that the Irish Sports Council's anti-doping programme is already leading the way on increasing blood testing.
Fahey was speaking at the Sports Council's 2012 anti-doping report, which found eight relatively minor offences, including the first ever sanctioning of a coach, in boxing, for administering banned substances to a minor.
Yet Fahey spoke in more sweeping terms, and how blood testing was the now crucial.
"We are reviewing our Wada code, the findings of that to be agreed later in the year, for implementation in 2014, but what we are likely to see is that penalties will be stiffened, probably to four years, and also to mandate that a certain percentage of testing must be blood. We exist to protect clean athletes, and our belief is that the vast majority of athletes do compete clean, but if there is any danger of us becoming complacent.
"Ireland, in fairness, is already carrying out more blood testing, compared to other countries. But we're also clear we do need more blood testing in team sports."
In 2012, the Sports Council carried out 787 tests, across 31 sports, with athletics the most tested sport on the programme (158 tests), followed by cycling (130), GAA (87), rugby (81) and boxing (53).
Of the eight positive tests of rule violations, four related to cannabis and from a substance found in supplements, including three members of a tug-of-war team, who were banned for 18 months each for the use of Methylhexanamine in a targeted in-competition test based on intelligence.
IAN O'RIORDAN
