Must-read of the week: The Doping Ordeal of Lizzy Banks

[yinzerniner]

When testing tech is used as an enforcement weapon instead of an investigative tool

https://lizzybanks.co.uk/

[P K]

Wow, Lizzy for president!

[m_sasso]

Currently dealing with a leviathan battle involving human rights entanglement, criminal law and life altering repercussion. This story is really hitting hard for me. Thanks for posting Yinzerniner.

[pdonk]

Having dealt with this from the sports admin side, the anti doping zealots are significantly worse then the dopers.

The senior people at WADA and associated agencies are career politicians who only look out for what is in their interest and don't care about the people they trample into the ground.

I bet that for every Dr. Michele Ferrari there are many Lizzy Banks.

[tootall]

Crazy stuff to read.

Somewhat related; has anybody ever noticed the seemingly high incident rate of elite cyclists with Asthma?

[julian3141]

Originally Posted by tootall

Crazy stuff to read.

Somewhat related; has anybody ever noticed the seemingly high incident rate of elite cyclists with Asthma?

or Baseball players with ADHD?

[benb]

Originally Posted by tootall

Crazy stuff to read.

Somewhat related; has anybody ever noticed the seemingly high incident rate of elite cyclists with Asthma?

All the cardiovascular intense endurance sports self select for people with a cardiovascular issue.

Makes total sense right?

It's way easier to believe the simple explanation that it's a cheating loophole to get yourself declared an asthmatic. It's super easy. You go say to your doctor that you are having breathing problems when exercising. The doctor doesn't understand or care if the real reason is you were trying to ride 50-100W over your lactate threshold and your body was just giving up.

I think one of the problems (and this is true with ADHD) is that it's too easy to get a diagnosis and medications and then the TUE just by answering the questions correctly.

My child has ADHD so we've been through that.. the bar to get yourself declared as having ADHD as an adult is actually lower than for a child. You just give the right answers and you've got your drugs, and IIRC you don't have to have quarterly doctor appointments to re-evaluate like kids do, and they certainly don't require your employer or others to check in with the doctor the way the school has to with kids.

I wonder what this woman's salary was... why do you bother to fight WADA/UCI that hard rather than just walking away. All these cyclists that make < $100k a year and the career is short.. why blow all your savings on lawyers to keep cycling? Heck she should switch to gravel where she won't get tested as much.

The irony of if her contamination with the diuretic came from her asthma medicine and she is like the typical elite cyclist that doesn't actually have serious asthma but has a TUE to use the inhaler.

Somebody who refers to themselves in the 3rd person also doesn't help me want to believe.

I think what the doping authorities worry about is that if they loosen guidelines to prevent a tiny # of false positives they open up a loophole that lets tons of false negative deliberate doping incidents happen.

If you haven't read through the whole thing the TLDR is that like all elite cyclists she either has asthma or claimed to have it to get a TUE so she can take the banned drug for it, had a bunch of health problems, so she had additional prescription medications in her system from surgery & other issues. She tested positive for 2 drugs, one of which is the asthma drug, the other is a diuretic. After a huge legal fight she somehow won her case based on scientific evidence that pharmaceutical drugs can be contaminated with other pharmaceutical drugs, but she never actually produced any samples drugs or lot #s of drugs she took that were proven to be contaminated.

The diuretic is not something with a PED background but it is used to mask taking other PEDs.

[72gmc]

I believe that some athletes cheat. I also believe that contamination is a problem for athletes who aren’t trying to cheat, but are looking for every advantage within the rules because their livelihoods depend on it.

I won’t get to read this story until after the work day. But I already think anti-doping orgs in professional sport are PR mechanisms that manipulate outcomes in service of business agendas. They aren’t about clean sport, they’re about deciding who gets shamed in the town square.

[earlfoss]

It's always a good idea to read defense tomes like Lizzy's with a critical eye. Many athletes at this level aren't healthy mentally or emotionally. As a former elite racer who has seen a lot over the decades, I believe asthma inhalers are abused by athletes. I was one of them for a short time. Honestly, they never worked for me but I didn't have actual asthma either. Neither did 99% of the athletes I knew who were using them.

[benb]

It's basically the same as if Contador had got cleared because it was actually possible that some beef could have been contaminated and they then decided that was the most likely source of his positive, even though he didn't produce any actual contaminated beef.

The UKAD group basically accepted that her testing positive for a masking agent was more likely to be pharmaceutical contamination even though she couldn't actually prove she took contaminated prescription medications, but she only won after she and her husband spent all their money fighting UKAD.

The other possibility is she took a different PED, masked it with the diuretic, beat the test for the actual PED, but screwed up with the diuretic.

But I already think anti-doping orgs in professional sport are PR mechanisms that manipulate outcomes in service of business agendas. They aren’t about clean sport, they’re about deciding who gets shamed in the town square and that the right athletes from the right countries win .

(Added onto that for you...)

[earlfoss]

Originally Posted by benb

The other possibility is she took a different PED, masked it with the diuretic, beat the test for the actual PED, but screwed up with the diuretic.

This is where my mind goes first.

[Likes2ridefar]

According to this paper asthma is more prevalent in elite endurance athletes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9633848/

“Asthma in elite athletes – do they have Type 2 or non-Type 2 disease? A new insight on the endotypes among elite athletes”

[prototoast]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the biggest shortcoming with the anti-doping procedures is that there is no control group. We simply don't have any idea how often a person who isn't a world class athlete, without incentive to dope, could test positive from some sort of contamination.

I could give the benefit of the doubt to Ms Banks, but her story is essentially the same as many other athletes who have tested positive, some who were given the benefit of the doubt, and others who were not (conside Michael Rogers versus Alberto contador, and how they were each treated after testing positive for clenbuterol).

Almost every athlete who tests positive has at least some plausible story, and it's really hard for anyone to know what to believe. It seems like by and large these stories are judged based on how much people likes the rider before.

As an additional policy matter, I would propose that doping suspensions be drastically reduced, maybe 3 to 6 months. Not so short that there's no disincentive for doping, but not so long that you ruin the career of somebody over an accidental ingestion.

[Xrslug]

This reminds me of the story of a Canadian junior cyclist that I heard recently on a podcast. Tested positive for a diuretic, Given the number of environmental contaminants, I don’t know what to make of stories like this. “Burke tested positive for less than one billionth of a gram. Few labs can even detect quantities this small, but Burke’s sample was sent to the WADA-approved INRS lab near Montreal that has this capability. After exhaustive research and some expert advice, indications pointed instead to the hypothesis of unintentional ingestion of contaminated water from the Abitibi town of Malartic.”
https://pedalmag.com/jack-burke-fina...r-de-labitibi/

[benb]

Originally Posted by Xrslug

This reminds me of the story of a Canadian junior cyclist that I heard recently on a podcast. Tested positive for a diuretic, Given the number of environmental contaminants, I don’t know what to make of stories like this. “Burke tested positive for less than one billionth of a gram. Few labs can even detect quantities this small, but Burke’s sample was sent to the WADA-approved INRS lab near Montreal that has this capability. After exhaustive research and some expert advice, indications pointed instead to the hypothesis of unintentional ingestion of contaminated water from the Abitibi town of Malartic.”
https://pedalmag.com/jack-burke-fina...r-de-labitibi/

Wow this one is super interesting too.. I wonder if it's bad journalism, they never actually mention whether they actually brought samples of the water from Malartic and proved that it would be highly likely if you drank the water in that town you'd get a tiny dose of the drug.

If they can detect it in the athlete and that is the explanation it should not be impossible to detect it in the water.