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topic: drug testing (4 articles)

Flying at your home site? Get ready for drug testing!

May 15, 2009, 8:21:33 EDT

Flying at your home site? Get ready for drug testing!

I don't recall seeing this in the CIVL Plenary minutes

CIVL|drug testing|USHPA

http://www.ushpa.aero/documents/minutes/2009_01_Spring.pdf

From the USHPA BOD minutes:

Dennis reviews the CIVL report and highlights five of the key items discussed at the CIVL convention. Drug testing is being stepped up—not just for competition—the testing will be expanded to recreational pilots.

There will apparently be more activity in the anti-doping camp. The FAI has been informed that they (along with twenty other sport organizations) are out of compliance. They are in danger of losing their $20,000 stipend from the Olympics committee, but more to the point, certain countries supporting the WADA drug testing will no longer allow the violating sports to be practiced in their country.

So it looks like more drug testing will take place. This testing has just become more onerous and invasive. Apparently selected individuals will have to inform the WADA officials were they can be reached one day a week for the next year. If their plans change in that year they have to inform the officials where they can be contacted. There has been a strong backlash in some professional sports to this policy, so who knows what will happen?

The chain of custody »

Mon, Jul 2 2007, 4:06:47 am GMT

If you are going to use science to prove something, you had better use good science

drug testing|Floyd Landis

Custody

http://blog.environmentalchemistry.com/2007/06/floyd-landis-wada-lndd-chain-of-custody_26.html

If the evidence presented thus far does not convince you that the testing procedures used to evaluate the Floyd Landis' urine samples were so seriously flawed that they should be excluded as evidence, read further. The testimony by Dr. Davis, a PhD in mass spectrometry, who was instrumental in designing the IsoPrime mass spectrometer being used in these tests and author of the users' manual for the instrument, should put the final nail in the coffin. Quite simply, there was nobody at the hearings who knew the IsoPrime mass spectrometer, which was used to test Landis' samples, better than Dr. Davis.

To summarize Dr. Davis' testimony, the installation of the mass spectrometer was improper and the technicians didn't know how to run the equipment. As a result, the accuracy of the instrument was suspect from the beginning of operation.

The drug testing system is broken. I suggest that we don't open ourselves up to it.

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Just say no to drug testing

May 22, 2007, 2:54:57 pm EDT

Drug testing

The debacle at the French laboratory continues.

drug testing

The LA Times article.

Oz Report forum.

Implications that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis may have used testosterone to bolster his endurance or add a shot of aggressiveness late in the race were dismissed by an expert Monday.

John K. Amory, an expert in testosterone therapy at the University of Washington in Seattle who was testifying for the American cyclist, said that no known pattern of doping was consistent with the urine test results reported by a French lab.

"I don't know of a physiological process" that could account for the lab's results, Amory said.

Amory said he found the French lab's test results contradictory and scientifically implausible. He testified that the lab's documentation didn't "make a lot of sense."

Dr. Wolfram Meier-Augenstein of Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, an expert in the carbon isotope ratio test with which LNDD analyzed Landis' sample, precisely outlined a raft of errors and false assumptions he said were made by the lab. He asserted that LNDD's work was so poor that its findings amounted to "speculation."

Most critically, he stated that LNDD's measurement of certain key metabolic ratios in the Landis sample violated standards of accuracy appearing in technical specifications issued by the World Anti-Doping Agency. If Landis can show that LNDD's work violated WADA standards, the arbitrators will be required to assume the violations caused the positive reading unless USADA can prove otherwise.

Meier-Augenstein testified that LNDD's analytical work, as demonstrated by its chromatograms — which depict the chemical components of Landis' urine as peaks on a chart — was so sloppy that "I have no confidence in the data."

Meier-Augenstein also observed that LNDD's readings on Landis' urine were so far out of line with results found in the clinical literature, even in studies of known testosterone users, that they raised more questions about the lab's technique than about Landis' actions.

"If I were running this lab and got this result," he said, "before I was on the phone to say this guy's a positive, I would run the test again to make sure the results stand up to scrutiny."

Amory said he volunteered to testify for Landis without pay after concluding that LNDD's documentation of test results was so inadequate.

He told the arbitration panel that patterns of testosterone readings found in Landis' urine samples, taken at various race stages, were inconsistent with one other. They also were inconsistent, he said, with any conceivable pattern of testosterone doping, whether by injection, oral administration or topical gel.

Why FAI Sporting Licenses?

Tue, May 6 2003, 3:00:03 pm EDT

Betinho Schmitz|CIVL|competition|drug testing|FAI|FAI Sporting License|medicine|news|Worlds

What good do these licenses do? Why do we have another hurdle to competition? What does having this piece of paper in your pocket do for anyone? Do we want to continually discourage pilots from entering competitions?

Getting an FAI Sporting License does nothing for the FAI or for CIVL. What control are we talking about here? Is this like the US southern states voter registration roles?

If this is only a problem for non Europeans? Is this another wedge to divide Europeans and non-Europeans? Should we just give up now and rename the WPRS the EPRS?

How is CIVL going to know who or who doesn’t have an FAI Sporting License? There is no central database. Each country keeps their own lists and doesn’t share them with the FAI.

What’s next, drug testing at the Worlds?

BTW, on that subject I did talk to Betinho about how many Red Bulls it would take fail the drug tests at the upcoming Worlds in Brazil. He was a bit vague but it seemed if he drank six to eight Red Bulls a day, he would get close to the limit. He said he would have a hard time doing more than three.

BTW did you notice that the International Olympic Committee never threw out the Iraqi National Olympic Committee even though it was well know that they tortured Iraq athletes?

http://espn.go.com/oly/news/2003/0221/1512236.html

http://www.iraqfoundation.org/hr/2002/cdec/27_issam.html

http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/chatESPN?event_id=2934

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/brennan/2003-04-24-brennan_x.htm

“The International Olympic Committee works in strange ways. If a gymnast is discovered to have taken a banned substance found in cold medicine, her Olympic gold medal can be stripped away, rightly enough, in little more than two days.

If a well-known sprinter tests positive for steroids, he can lose his Olympic gold medal overnight and have his reputation ruined forever.

But if a national Olympic committee tortures its own athletes, if it beats them, if it orders some of its athletes to be thrown off a bridge or tossed into a vat of raw sewage, the IOC will have a committee get all over it.

The allegations are in the mail. No hurry on that report. Get back to us in a few months, will you?”

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