Back in July
I reported how ITV 4 attacked Stefan
Schumacher after his stage win in this years Tour
de France over
anomalies
and a police intoxication test. Well in retesting of samples by the
French Anti-Doping Agency the German along with Italy's Leonardo
Piepoli have tested positive for Continuous Erythropoiesis Receptor Activator (
CERA) and 3rd generation version of
erythropoietin (
EPO). Italy's Riccardo
Ricco had already confessed to using
CERA which makes winners of 5 of the 21 stages of this years race now proven drug cheats.
While endurance events like the Tour
de France are a target for the use of
EPO and
CERA type
enhancement drugs it is good to see that the Tour is taking testing to
new levels and retrospectively carrying out tested when new tests are
available. It means that the cheats cannot get away with it, even if
they think they may initially have masked their misuse.
The continual testing in professional tour cycling and the comparison to a normal sample looking for
anomalies seems to be working in highlighting just what samples look
suspicious. As the examples of
Schumacher and
Piepoli show as
do other examples
from this year's Tour the organisers are doing their utmost to change
the image of the sport. It means weeding out the cheats but they are
pro-active in seeking out samples from
anomalous
samples in the run up to the race during competition, and now show they
are prepared to follow up with new testing procedures after the event
if necessary. They want the greatest cycling spectacle to be above
suspicion. However, to do that every suspicious improvement or result
is going
to have to be looked at, sudden improvements and rapid recovery are signs that something may be up.
Other sports including Athletics may well take a page out of the Tour
de
France's book. As their regime is starting to pay off, racers are
calling for clean racing and are shunning those who are now caught out.
They are being suspended or sacked from their teams upon suspicion even
if they are a favourite. That is one sport taking the drug cheats
seriously and treating them as such.
