Taking on the testers
One rider's effort to clear his name
D'Antoni maintains his innocence
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On September 24, the United States Antidoping Agency announced the two-year suspension of 27-year-old Joey D'Antoni.
The track racer from Raleigh, North Carolina, tested positive for recombinant human Erythropoietin (rHuEPO), a synthetic hormone that increases the body's ability to produce red blood cells.
D'Antoni is the third U.S. cyclist to test positive for the banned hormone. Former U.S. national time trial champion Adham Sbeih tested positive in August of 2003. More recently, up-and-coming rider Adam Bergman joined the blacklist.
Sbeih argued he never took EPO. "I've never even seen the stuff," he said.
Despite offering evidence in his hearing that his result would have been considered negative had the EPO test been run at the Australian WADA lab, Sbeih earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first U.S. cyclist to be found guilty of taking EPO and socked with a two year ban.
For all intents and purposes, the competitive careers of all three men are now finished. Sbeih has since retired and now works in the financial industry.Bergman, whose case is pending before the North American Court of Arbitration for Sport, declined to be interviewed citing his the upcoming arbitration hearing. But those familiar with the CAS process say he has little chance of overturning a test result that has no way of being contradicted.
UCLA Olympic Lab Director Dr. Don Catlin, M.D., acknowledges the lack of outside peer review for the EPO test.
"I do not know of a single lab - other than a handful of WADA labs - that performs this test," says Catlin. "There is no demand for it other than for doping control. Maybe there is a clandestine lab trying to monitor athletes?"
Hamilton's gold
These cases occur on the heel of what is currently the most famous doping saga in cycling, that of gold medalist Tyler Hamilton's unconfirmed positive A test at the Athens Olympics for homologous blood transfusions (transfusing another individual's blood). Although Hamilton's B sample was destroyed by WADA lab technicians who inadvertently deep-froze it, he still has a pending transfusion case in January 2005 before the CAS for returning positive A and B samples during the Vuelta a España, a month after the Olympics.
World Antidoping Agency chief Dick Pound went on record declaring - some say prematurely - that Hamilton's gold medal in the time trial is tainted.
"It appears a cyclist might have escaped this net because of human error," intimated Pound at Hamilton's destroyed B sample, which under International Olympic Committee rules meant the doping case against Hamilton had to be dropped. "But I can assure you it's no longer a gold medal in the eyes of the world. If nothing else, we got him on the second bounce."
The image of the nice guy from Marblehead, Massachusetts sitting in a hotel room with someone else's blood hanging from an IV pole conjures up images of the dark revelations of a program undertaken by the 1984 U.S. Olympic cyclingteam. During the boycotted Los Angeles Games, team USA admitted some of its riders resorted to such Draconian performance-enhancing methods, which atthe time were regarded as unethical, but legal, under IOC and UCI rules.
Under WADA's umbrella for all Olympic sports, blood transfusions are now considered a form of performance-enhancing doping, and banned. However no test currently exists for detecting autologous transfusions (transfusing one's own blood).
Recently, Hamilton offered a peek of optimism to supporters when speaking at a Berkeley, California fundraiser for his Tyler Hamilton Foundation, declaring to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle that his positive was the result of "an incredible story."
Only time will tell which definition of incredible applies. In the meantime, Hamilton is not acting as a man burdened by either guilt or apprehension, even signing posters in Las Vegas at the cycling industry's annual confab, the Interbike trade show.
A little more than a month after Interbike, an article in the Spanish sports daily MARCA revealed that Hamilton's Phonak teammate Santigo Perez, runnerup in the Vuelta a España, also tested positive for homologous bloodtransfusions.
"I am not sure what they are talking about and I'm really shocked by the news and by the behavior of the UCI," said Perez.
For the moment, the Swiss-based Phonak team stands by both its riders and plans to challenge the scientific veracity of the test in Hamilton's January CAS hearing, which will no doubt be a battle of experts. Since no other positives for blood transfusions exists in Olympic sport to date, skeptics are pondering the probability of the only two cases being false positives from teammates who both live in Spain.
Swiss rider and former world road champion Oscar Camenzind, who also raced for Phonak, was banned for two years after testing positive for EPO shortly before the Athens Games. Camenzind admitted he used the banned substance and quickly announced his retirement.
Catlin says he has no idea whether or not he will be called as an expert witness in USADA v. Hamilton to vouch for the science behind the Australian blood transfusion test. The method used was pioneered by the Australian research consortium Science and Industry Against Blood doping (SIAB) and funded by USADA and WADA grant money.
Relying on flow cytometry, a 30-year-old technology employed by hospitals throughout the world, the Australian test represents a new application and new measurement standards. A summary of the approach was published in the November2003 issue of Haematologica. It has yet to be replicated in other published studies.
The homologous transfusion test was developed by Margaret Nelson at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. It was designed to isolate minor blood group proteins to detect whether a subject transfused someone else's blood.
One of the study researchers, Dr. Michael Ashenden, project coordinator for SIAB, said in an interview earlier this year that, "I hope that if there is one positive that comes out of [the Hamilton incident] it's that athletes using this form of doping know they have to stop. It's repugnant."
Both the Russian and Australian Olympic federations filed an appeal with the international Court of Arbitration for Sport to contest Hamilton's negative test in the hopes of augmenting their country's medal count. The consensus, however, is that the two federations have little chance of prevailing under IOC rules, which are painstakingly clear in situations where a B sample cannot validate the A sample result.
Joey D'Antoni: False Positive or Playing Possum?
Joey D'Antoni started racing bikes when he was 15 after getting tired of playing baseball.
"I rode and raced endurance track," says D'Antoni.
His results were never world class, but D'Antoni did manage marginal success in the elite amateur ranks. In 2001 D'Antoni won the national 10-mile scratch series and took fifth at 2003 nationals in the 4km pursuit. This past year, D'Antoni won the overall at the Tour of Louisiana and was third in the time trial at the Valley of the Sun.
Although D'Antoni says he doesn't take money to teach other riders, he does serve as mentor to those looking to improve their race results.
"I don't really run a coaching business. I coach three riders for free, and help out a couple of teams with clinics and stuff," D'Antoni said.
So what do all these athletes have in common? They all claim the WADA tests are wrong.
The science behind the EPO test is complicated enough to make any thorough inquiry beyond the scope of a cycling industry article.Proving that a test can generate a theoretical false positive under certain rare conditions is a far less formidable task than demonstrating a false positive is the likely explanation.
To start, the EPO and homologous blood transfusion tests are not at all similar to the mass spectrometer tests used to detect most substances on the WADA banned list such as steroids, stimulants, and masking agents. To detect those substances, an expensive machine called a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer is used to measure concentrations of banned substances in an athlete's blood as small as parts per billion. The machine's software generates the peaks and valleys unique to each atom's weight and then compares it to its vast database of molecular signatures for banned substances and, badda-boom-badda-bing, spits out a jury verdict of guilt or innocence that has never been overturned by the CAS in WADA's four-year existence.
The error rate depends on the analyte, says Catlin, but is in the range of one ten thousandths of one percent (.0001 percent). An athlete would need expert witnesses of the likes of Einstein and Steven Hawking to beat the rap from a “mass spec,” as its called.
Further obfuscating athlete credibility is that many who test positive for nandrolone and other anabolic steroids also claim innocence. To a certain extent, their declarations are true: that is, the majority of such cases are likely due to inadvertent ingestion.
Contamination during the manufacturing process of supplements is the most likely explanation for a spate of U.S. athlete positives such as bobsledder Pavle Jovanovic and cyclists Brooke Blackwelder, Scott Moninger, and Amber Neben.
However, unlike the test for steroids the EPO test relies on a statistical baseline comparison of the electrical charge of naturally occurring EPO -- also called endogenous EPO -- to recombinant humanerythropoietin (rHuEPO). rHuEPO is made from Chinese hamster ovarycells transfected with DNA encoding HuEPO.
HuEPO is the main factor responsible for the proliferation of erythrocytes (red blood cells that carry oxygen) in the human body.
Drugs containing rHuEPO such as Procrit, Epogen, and sister-drug Aranesp were developed to help anemic patients replenish red blood cells -- particularly those patients with cancer or renal failure. HuEPO production takes place in the kidneys where tissue oxygen sensor cells detect oxygen depletion.
Although the EPO test is sensitive enough to catch a lot of cheaters, it's false positive rate has never been established by a lab outside the WADA payroll. The WADA test for Aranesp -- also called darbepoetin alpha, or "Super-EPO" -- utilizes the identical testing method as the epoetin alpha drugs Procrit and Epogen, but is much less controversial due to very distinctive iso-electric markers that makes the chance of a false positive virtually non-existent.
However, Catlin asserts the test result for an athlete caught using Procrit or Epogen is just as bulletproof and cannot generate a false positive.
"Zero [percent]," states Catlin. "The test must not produce false positives."
VeloNews asked D'Antoni for his side of the story.
VeloNews: You are saying you didn't take -- never took – never even saw EPO. What you are really saying is the EPO test done byUSADA and the UCLA Olympic Lab must be wrong.
Joey D'Antoni: Yes.
VN: Have you ever been tested by USADA for EPO before?
JD: Yes, twice last year.
VN: Does it bother you that USADA does not take blood when they test for EPO -- there is no way to know what your hematocrit was at the time you tested positive -- thus stripping an athlete of a hematocrit baseline comparison defense?
JD: Yes completely. I feel as though the RBC is the key factor in the test.
I arrived at [Joey's] house to find him sitting in stunned silence, and then he said, 'I got a Fed Ex.' I knew what it meant, because we had joked about it after we both had to get drug tested - that negative tests come via the U.S. Postal Service and positive ones get delivered Fed Ex. At the time I found that fact funny. Now, it wasn't funny at all.
Laura Weislo
Cat. 1 cyclist coached by D'Antoni
VN: If Adham Sbeih had his EPO test conducted at the WADA lab in Australia instead of at the UCLA Olympic Lab he would have tested negative. Are you aware that the WADA labs get to pick the threshold at which they declare an EPO test positive, and that cutoff doesn't even have to match each other?
JD: No, I didn't know that. Adham, he used my disk for the pursuit final at T-town -- I've known him for a while. I've also heard that various chemicals can effect the outcome of the test. I took a vaccine -- one of the one's my company Wyeth makes -- shortly before the Ft. Lauderdale test. While scientifically I doubt it could make any difference, it is made in a manner to EPO, in that uses a fermentation process of CHO cells [Chinese hamster ovary]. I'm adopted, so I don't have much idea of my genetic makeup.
VN: What specifically do you know about any lab deficiencies at the UCLA Olympic Lab?
JD: The lab doesn't seem up to GLP standards [Good Laboratory Practices]. I'm trained in GMP [Good Manufacturing Practices], so I know a little bit of what I was looking for.
D'Antoni offered a list of deficiencies he noticed on his visit to the UCLA Olympic Lab when he arrived to supervise the testing of his B sample:"In verifying that my sample had not been tampered with, I was forced to sign a document verifying the sample's condition before it was defrosted. I was unable to verify that there was no leakage."
"The vials used for aliquotting were labeled by hand. Ideally they should be bar-coded to prevent human error."
"Solutions used in sample prep were not labeled with expiration dates."
"Pipet tips did not contain filters to prevent cross-contamination. [The] lab tech vigorously pipetted [my] sample which could create aerosols and could lead to cross-contamination as the controls were pipetted before the USADA sample."
"The pH testing strip was dipped into the sample -- another potential source of contamination. The sample should be spotted onto the pH strip."
"No written protocol was visible - the tech appeared to be doing everything by memory."
"No machine calibration labels were visible."
"In addition on my B sample results, the gels provided as evidence do not contain the positive and negative controls on the same gel as the USADA sample. A direct comparison between the band intensities isn't scientifically valid. There should have been a negative control on the same gel as my sample."
We went to the lab, and it was less than inviting. As you wait to be escorted back to the lab, you are seated facing the door, upon which is a very ugly photo of another cyclist who famously tested positive and was banned for life. In very tiny letters under the photo was written something to the effect that if this person shows up that they aren't to be let in...
Laura Weislo[The photo is of former track cyclist turned powerlifter TammyThomas - Editor]
VN: There's some people out there saying you were asking about EPO use on some newsgroups a while back. If so, could you explain what your motivations were in those posts?
JD: I wasn't. From my understanding there were allegations about a common ID between two sites or something. I've been staying way from newsgroups. I did a fair amount of research into the test, after Sbeih's positive, but I haven't been involved with any body building sites ever.
VN: So for this website “Faster1” is not you?
JD: No. Faster1 is not me. I work for a pharmaceutical company - a major one. Any question I have about EPO can be answered by a 10 second intranet search of published documents and journals.
VN: What were the results of your A and B tests?
JD: A:96, B:90
VN: Do you find it strange that the same EPO test generates two different results that, according to USADA's own testing methodology, has nearly a 7 percent margin of error - yet USADA would have to admit it's the same urine with the exact same level of EPO?
JD: That's exactly what I was thinking, when I saw that last night. If they could have done a third sample we might not be having this discussion right now.
Phil Marques is a freelance journalist and photographer who lives in southern New Jersey. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia with a bachelor's degree in biology, he worked for several years at a major pharmaceutical company as a researcher and scientific auditor. A former racer, promoter and bicycle product manufacturer, he can often be found buzzing around the peloton in many NRC races, albeit usually on the back of a moto these days.
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