Doping

What are the upper scores that suggest further investigation, 103 female and 134 male?

As the page you liked to says, spot off scores are useless unless exceptional. These are not exceptional but borderline. I wonder if there are any higher scores in that dataset and I wonder what the context of those scores might be.

Pretty much any clean top class athlete will have borderline blood values anyway, due to being the best. It makes it really, really hard to distinguish between the people with ultra exceptional physiology, and the chemically enhanced lesser athletes.

Is there any evidentiary basis for this supposition? As I understand it, there is no reason for elite athletes to have OFF-scores that are close to the boundaries, though of course some will, even to the point of generating false positives.

Well, I guess just that the most exceptional athletes will have the most exceptional physiology - it's not all about blood though. Dr Hutch talks about it in Faster - there's many things (6 or so?) that go into making an endurance cyclist the best, and the chance of having all six being really high in one athlete are vanishingly small.
From memory, we're looking at VO2 max, efficiency, haematocrit, muscle fibre type, erm... can't remember the rest. Obviously of these, blood is one you can artificially enhance quite easily.

"...the British rider's (Wiggins 2009) values well below the parameters potentially indicative of any artificial performance-enhancing methods."
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/wiggins-values-point-to-cleaner-peloton/

Pretty much any clean top class athlete will have borderline blood values anyway, due to being the best.

I don't think this is true.

The really talented cyclists have it all going on... and naturally low haematocrit. That way they fucking fly once they've bumped it up to 49%

:)

more on colombian riders. maria luisa calle williams got popped for GHRP-2 in the panamerican games sometime in july. sorry if abp. she almost got in trouble back in the athens 2004 games for some other substance. had her bronze taken away and returned. i only found out about both stories in a colombian news report tonight.

Guardian (14.9.15) "Doping is a problem for all sports, not just athletics"

I was interested by this statement: "It feels odd, at least, for us not to be at least a tiny bit suspicious when footballers are able to perform far more high intensity sprints than ever before."

In the context of the article I feel that the writer, Sean Ingle, is hinting that footballers are using EPO. I have assumed for some time that this is the case, and I also assume that professional sports writers are aware of this.

What interests me here is that this looks like a breaking of the 'omerta' surrouding footballers' drug use. Perhaps I just don't get out enough, what do others think?

People in every sport are doping. Even snooker players are at it.

Football, tennis, athletics, rugby - all dirty.

I thought it was general knowledge that football has massive PED use. The Fuentes evidence pertaining to Spanish football clubs being buried, for example. People talking openly about plasma spinning and blood re-infusions. I've edited a public Q&A with Ian Wright talking about how Wenger came into Arsenal and revolutionised the place by doing things like vitamin injections.
The fact that there's almost no testing, but the pressure and the pay is higher than almost any other sport kind of suggests on its own that PED use would be rampant. I think it's not really talked about that much because the governing bodies have so much political influence, and preserving the status quo is more profitable for everyone. Also, it's not really seen as such an important factor in deciding results - it's supposed to be a game of skill, and people may think that PEDs don't help with the skills side of the game. Of course that's not true; the drugs help you perform at a higher level for longer.
To present a counter-argument to all that guff - the training football players do is utterly insane. There's so, so much gym work and conditioning work that the players today are worlds apart from those of 20 years ago. I've worked a lot on the Nike Academy stuff, which is a football academy for unsigned almost-could-be-pro players aged around 18ish. There's no way they're giving those kids PEDs (jesus, I hope not), but they go in skinny little kids and come out as brawny men... and that's even before they're fully physically developed. I think there's a lot of physical potential we didn't have the training knowledge to exploit before the age of blood doping arrived - that's the knowledge gap you may have heard Sky refer to when explaining how they've managed to become a top team so quickly.

Rugby's hilariously dirty. Look at the list of current UKAD sanctions:
http://www.ukad.org.uk/anti-doping-rule-violations/current-violations/

I grew up playing rugby (union) but the game became a sport for gymbunnies.

I got taller and skinnier and couldn't compete any more.

I'm not saying I saw anybody using PEDs, but when I stopped playing around 2004, there were only two guys on my team who were into weights and they would be able to get all sorts of stuff.

Interestingly, I played a season in France and loads of the guys on my team would toke before and after matches. Even though we were quite low level, we did get tested and one guy got popped for it.

I know plenty of decent rugby players that smash a shit ton of steriods.

NO idea how they get away With it.

Lots of us got tested last national 7s. Thats Norwegian Nationals, so not exactly big time rugby. Maybe the local sport federation was having a general clamp Down. But it felt kinda weird, given that half the time we're reffing for each other. So theres plenty of opertunity to cheat if you wanted to.

Baseball, on the other hand - totally clean.

As is bodybuilding.

There's no way they're giving those kids PEDs

How so?

Because the Nike Academy is basically run as a huge Nike promo. Obviously this goes a bit against the general feeling at the moment with Nike athletes being safe from IAAF sanctions (whether that's true or false, I don't know), but if it were to emerge that Nike were giving teenagers PEDs as part of what is essentially a commercial promotion - I mean, fuck. They'd be torn apart.
On an aside - the coaches would also seem, from everything I've seen and heard, to have the wellbeing of the kids as their foremost priority.

But this is the internet, so we should start with a base assumption that drug use is rife in all sports and work from there.

Yeah, sorry - what was I thinking?

Obviously they're injecting these kids with irradiated dogs' blood.

As long as it's one or the other, and there are no in betweens, then we're all good I guess.

I remember Alex Ferguson raging at Rio Ferdinand's ban, and complaining about drug testing in general. As Bash mentioned, a variety of football teams have been whispered to be connected with Fuentes, including Barca, Athletico Madrid and the German national team, but of course only the cyclists involved have been named.

I doubt Nike could be directly involved in giving teenagers drugs.
Although a large corporation involved in something unethical? Who'd think it possible.
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/boycottslist.aspx

Test time! http://www.thepelotonbrief.com/quiz-wada-banned-substance-or-metal-band/

https://twitter.com/mattslaterbbc/status/644804285281234944

Of the 49 athletes currently serving a UK anti-doping ban, 29 play egg chasing in one form or the other.

Filthy sports, yet you don't see it mentioned anywhere by the mainstream media.