Doping

My point is really about process here. So the other alternative would lead to it being reclassified again.

I think my position with this is starting to change.

I would consider that significant enough to counsel patients about before prescribing though. Having said that, it's a bit of a throwaway comment because I dont know if that tachycardia is physiologically significant during maximal exercise

It's on the patient information leaflet, but it has never been explicitly drawn to my attention by any physician. AFAIK, it's rarely troublesome with inhaled salbutamol, the increase in resting HR if it exists at all is typically of the order of 20bpm. If your exercise induced tachycardia is adding 100bpm or more to your resting HR, any effect of salbutamol is likely to be buried in the noise.

there's evidence to suggest that long term salbutamol use induces tolerance and reduces its effectiveness in exercise induced asthma

From two quite different studies with a total of 18 subjects using salbutamol monotherapy. It's evidence of a kind, but not that strong and not a very large effect. Before coming to conclusions, I'd want to see the effect of combination therapy (steroid+β2-agonist) which is the standard regime, and I'd want to see whether tolerance was permanent or transitory. As I said earlier, we're moving towards individualised medicine, and asthma therapy is one of the easy ones to individualise because we can do (and I have done) simple cheap spirometry tests to compare different regimes. For all that we know, Froome might have spent the whole of every training camp for the last decade carefully testing different regimes in order to optimise his pulmonary function.

Meanwhile, Lotto Jumbo NL road team throws out Juan Jose Lobato, and cautioned Antwan Tolhoek and Pascal Eenkhoorn for Noctamid, (Snus tobacco and) Stilnoct (sleeping pills) abuse during training camp in Girona...

VDB & Gaumont days revisited, only they didn't fall asleep but were still partying in a brothel up until a couple of hours before the start of the 1999 Ronde van Vlaanderen.

Interesting musings from interview with the sexist Pete Kennaugh , not clear if his words so probably not "While Froome abruptly transformed"

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/kennaugh-i-was-going-through-the-motions-at-team-sky-i-had-to-leave/

The Sports Personality of the Year award understandably couldn't be given to someone with the cloud of doping suspicion hanging over them. So it's gone to Mo Farah instead.

Good reading...
https://cyclingtips.com/2017/12/certainly-doesnt-look-good-doctor-speaks-froome-case/

If Froome does get a doping ban, what do you think the chances of Sky keeping him? It would go against their policies/ marketing so should technically sack him.

This is all a bit meh, I'm already so bored of this and it is going to last well into the season, and we probably won't get a satisfactory conclusion.

Cycling's kinda fucked, isn't it? it's the one sport that is properly making an effort to clean house, that properly goes after the big names (post Lance anyway) despite the damage it does, while other sports where drug use is rampant seem to get away with it, because no-one, journos included, want to rock the boat.

Cycling's kinda fucked, isn't it?

I don't agree. I'm fairly sure the monuments and grand tours will be contested for at least my lifetime. What may be challenged is individuals and companies ability to make big money out of cycling, but that doesn't bother me. It would be better if it was all amateur to be honest.

Tihange has been leaking since it was built.

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I didn't mean it is about to implode or anything. Doping in sports is fucking EVERYWHERE, its just in other sports it's ignored: the fans, the authorities and even the journalists aren't interested, because of the money sloshing around there: no one wants to get off the gravy chain. I mean do you think football fans want to hold their favourite player accountable? When Rio Ferdianand got busted Fergie went nuts and blamed the authorities and the fans never thought of him as a doper.

In cycling there seems to be this giant act of self-flagellation over doping. Lets face it, everyone in the sport is tainted, all those heroes stretching back over the years: Coppi, Simpson, Merckx, Kelly, Indurain. Hippy wants to claim Cadel won it clean, not according to a corner of the internet who think he was a Ferrari client. Cancellara was linked to Fuentes, you got Wiggins and his jiffy bag, Contador and his steak and now we have Froome the alien, the most unlikely emergence of a GT winner ever, the transformation all the doubters point to, from hanging on to a motorbike in the Giro, to almost being let go by Sky, then suddenly in the 2011 Vuelta he's the strongest in the race, and should have won. Then he repeats that trick in the 2012 Tour, and the rest is history: from unwanted domestique that could barely ride a bike to the bestest there is. And for that to be believable he needed to be 100% squeaky clean.

And then this. And it all comes tumbling down, and cycling is once again involved in collective navel-gazing and hand-wringing wondering why the hell he got pinged for something as innocuous as a few extra puffs of ventolin. And it is going to drag on and on and on. I'm just so bored of it. Not the actual cycling, just the fucking internet circus around it.

I'm less navel gazing than marvelling at Froomes eternal love for his stem.

I'm just so bored of it. Not the actual cycling, just the fucking internet circus around it.

You are allowed to turn off the internet.

Yeah but it doesn't change the fact this is going on. And its the media too, you just get to the point where it would be nice to know something, anything definitive about all of this. Instead it's just innuendo and speculation.

Bread and circuses

A moment of clarity

Guilty of what? He's already failed the test. Unless he can prove that his body is magically (ok, maybe not magically) turning a legal dose of x into an illegal level of y in his piss then he should be banned and stripped of his winnings and confined to the bin of pointless 'won but cheated' riders that seems to plague the sport.

Sounds like caffeine or beetroot juice are more performance enhancing than salbutamol.

Yep, but they're not banned (or intake limited).

When has a cycling doping positive ever not been leaked?

Viva La Lance!

Sky made certain that all their medical records were accurate and up to date.

Which is why it's so disappointing to find that the Team Sky mascot Lab-rador has managed to eat not one but all three copies of everything, including the off-site backups.

Lampre adds, "Ulissi strongly denies taking such a large amount of salbutamol."

Ulissi has asked for the B sample to be tested, and will also undergo controlled urinary tests in relation to salbutamol.

Semi-colon doper.

When I was tested I had to piss twice, in two separate flasks, because I was too dehydrated post-race (and this was in Wales). The tester was said not to panic and drink shitloads in order to piss again, because if I diluted the second go too much it'd be fucking hours before I could leave waiting for the concentration to go up again.

Why just this stage? If he was using it his whole career and was tested a lot of times, why only now did he go over the limit?