All these positives for tiny amounts bring me back to this quote from the head of WADA's Montreal Lab.
WADA regulations set no minimum threshold for the drug. Ayotte doesn't favor setting one as she considers any trace finding
to be suspect.
"We can't link content in urine to performance, because we don't know the time, the mode of administration or the dose," she said. "If this case is lost because they're concluding the amount is too small, that would be a major problem. It's not the end of the world, but if competent arbitrators decide that, my heart would break. More dopers would go through the net."
http://espn.go.com/olympics/blog/_/name/olympics/id/5685675
She says "suspect", but in WADA terms, any trace is guilt, period. The guy who proved Mexican meat before still lost a year of his career. They would rather punish innocent people than let a cheater get away, even though guys get away with using things a lot more beneficial to their performance. Contador's level was forty times less than labs are required to detect. This one was even less. I don't know mountain biking - was this training at a time when a guy would be desperate enough to lose weight that he would use drugs?
They know that Clenbuterol is allowed and used in a lot of countries, and enters the normal food supply. With the Contador case, it was said that only four labs in the world could detect that amount. Imagine if all labs get that precise, and all the non-vegetarian athletes from those countries get banned?
If the minimum threshold was set at a reasonable level based on real life, a lot of these cases would never have happened. And Contador is actually the perfect case to show that, because they had clean urine samples from two days before and two days after the two days that had trace amounts. They know that he didn't use it during the Tour for performance. They can't prove he cheated in any way. The idea that a guy could ride 120 miles, including four or five major climbs, and decide he needed to pop a pill for a one day weight loss plan is ridiculous.
And they still punish people like the guy who got the year for eating Mexican meat, and they want to appeal the Otcharov case. All because people like the professor in Montreal decided not to make a minimum threshold because they believe suspicion should cost someone their results and two years of their career.
It's like a couple of years ago in the US when they discovered melanine in products from China, and they worked their way into our food supply through chickens and pigs, etc. I doubt that any of the 300 million of us intentionally ingested melanine, but I'll bet a lot of us would have had it in our system at some point.
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