frenchfry said:
Often doping positives are for low levels of forbidden substances. One reason could be contamination, another could be that the rider was expecting the substance to have cleared his system to be undetectable, and only minute levels remain at the time of doping control. This is why it seems unreasonable to me to assume that Roger's positive is from contamination.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that a low level of CB (though we still don't know what his level was) indicates doping, because a doper would time his ingestion so that only a low level would exist when he got tested. But contamination generally also results in a low level, so that doesn't mean much. Even in China, most meat is probably not contaminated, and most that is is probably contaminated at a relatively low level. The fact that the government doesn't do enough to ensure cleanliness doesn't mean that anything goes, that producers can sell meat without any effort at all to reduce its contamination.
Someone was asking why, if meat is so contaminated in China, more athletes there don't test positive. I'd guess one reason is because the tests often use the maximum criterion of 2 ng/ml. One might frequently get a level not exceeding that by eating typically contaminated meat, particularly since an athlete will often be tested some time after eating meat.
My question is, how much contaminated meat would he have to eat to get a positive and what would the concentration of clen have to be in the meat. 48oz of steak? 16oz? One cheese Whopper? How about the fries?
It depends on what level he tested at, and the level of contamination of meat. We were able to estimate that Contador probably would have had to eat several kgs of beef, because we knew his level, and because Spain does not allow the importation or sale of meat with a level above a certain standard. We may eventually learn what Rogers' level was, but we have no way of knowing how contaminated the meat he ate might have been (assuming that is the explanation). It's possible it could have contained far more CB than the Spanish standard.
So the short answer is, Rogers' level, for all we know now, might have resulted from eating a fairly small portion of meat.