Sky's the limit: how to detect team-wide doping
There seems to be a near consensus in the Clinic that Sky is achieving its remarkable results—dominating two stage races at the same time—by doping. If this is true, how are they getting away with it, and why aren’t riders on other teams, some of whom are likely also doping, unable to do so as effectively?
There are two ways a team like Sky might gain an advantage by doping. Frist, a better doping program for individual riders, and second, a team-wide doping program, which includes the domestiques. Based on the way Sky has been riding, a lot of suspicion has been focused on this second factor. But if that’s the case, it might actually be easier to detect than individual doping.
The passport basically tracks the ratio of hematocrit and hemoglobin to reticulocytes. This ratio has to be different from a baseline value to a very highly significant degree. Thus a rider may still blood-dope, but only up to a limit without getting caught. Any rider doping today is aware of this, and has a pretty good idea of to what degree he can manipulate his blood and go undetected.
If Sky or any other team has a team-wide blood doping program, extending to all of their riders, one would expect that all of their riders could be fairly near this limit. In this situation, while the value for any individual rider might not be significant, the value for the team as a whole most certainly would be. For example, suppose everyone on the team, as a result of blood doping, has a passport reading that is significantly different from the baseline at a level of p < 0. 1. A value like this would indicate doping 90% of the time, but this is not nearly significant enough to trigger further action against any individual.
But the odds of every rider on the team having a value like this is 0. 000000001, a slam dunk case for doping. Even if only some of the riders have values like this, it could be significant. The odds of four of nine undoped riders having blood values like this would be I believe roughly one in a hundred, while the odds of five riders like this would be one in a thousand. The odds of course would be even higher if these individual riders were even closer to the limit, say, having an individual probability of p < 0.05.
One problem with this approach, of course, is that ordinarily not all members of a team are given passport tests at the same time. But perhaps anti-doping officials should consider doing this in some cases where team-wide doping is a reasonable suspicion. Then there is the question of what kind of sanctions would follow a highly significant finding, at the team level. By the current rules, no individual rider could be sanctioned, but I think a highly significant result by team analysis would justify invalidating the team's results, along with further targeting. In any case, it would be a very interesting case where one could not prove that any particular rider on the team was doping, but could prove to a very high degree of certainty that someone was.
EDIT: I merged this post from yet another Sky thread
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