[SPINTECK]

This biological passport thing looks sketchy to me. The organization just needs to do the expensive testing necessary. Why do the epitestosterone test if the Mass Spect carbon test is more accurate?? Because it was more expensive!!

I believe in better tests, not biological profile testing, which I don't trust to be accurate anyway, unless it was done over 3 years, but some careers don't last that long.

discuss? what do you guys think of this biological passport?

The new passport: A conversation with Anne Gripper
By John Wilcockson
VeloNews Editorial Director
in Paris
Filed: October 24, 2007
There was almost unanimous support for the proposed biological passport at the well-attended International Meeting Against Doping in Cycling held in Paris Monday and Tuesday. The meeting resulted in an agreement being signed by the World Anti-Doping Agency, the Union Cycliste Internationale and the conference's host, the French Ministry of Health, Youth and Sports, with the goal being the passport program being introduced by the start of the 2008 road cycling season.


Anne Gripper seen with David Howman, general director of WADA and Chairman of the French Agency for the fight against doping (AFLD) Pierre Bordry (R) in Paris.


photo: Agence France Presse


So what is a biological passport? And what will it represent in the continuing fight against doping? To find out, VeloNews spoke in Paris with Anne Gripper, the anti-doping manager of the UCI.

Prior to starting her current job, which has held for about a year, Gripper spent six years with the Australian Anti-Doping Agency and before that she was with the Australian Sports Commission, the overall governing body for sport down under. A former competitive triathlete, Gripper came to Europe in 2005 to complete a master's degree in sports administration and technology at a university in Lausanne, Switzerland - not far from the UCI headquarters in Aigle.

"They knew I was here, and so I happened to be in the right place at the right time," said Gripper. "I've always been passionate about developing sport, and the UCI's biggest challenge at the moment is anti-doping. They knew they had to do something different. They had the Puerto case and the Landis case... It's a challenging job, but I believe we can make some progress.

"It's not just talking the talk. We are beginning to make some changes, and we've gotta keep going there. It'll look bad for two or three years; [the new program] is gonna make cycling look really bad because we're gonna get more positive cases, and we're gonna have more high-profile media issues. I think we've got to steel ourselves to get through this period and then ultimately come out the other end towards a cleaner sport."

Gripper added that other endurance sports, including cross-country skiing, track and field, triathlon, rowing and speed skating, will be watching cycling's biological passport project very closely, and then likely adopting it themselves. But first, we have to understand what this new approach to the fight against doping really means.


VeloNews: To a layperson, how would you describe the biological passport?
Anne Gripper: It's really a series of tests that enable us to make a determination as to the likelihood of doping based on that rider's individual profile. So rather than comparing one single sample to a population norm, we're comparing a range of samples to an athlete's expected profile. So it gives us a lot greater sensitivity, enabling us to determine that this rider is likely to be doing something that manipulates their blood, or likely to be doing something that relates to steroid use.

We may not actually be able to say what it is, whether it's autologous blood transfusions or micro-dosing with EPO, but what it will show is that this rider is highly likely to have been doing something illegal. So it's a whole new approach; it's using that forensic approach, assessing evidence to the point where you believe you've got a quality set of data that can take us to the use or attempted use into doping.

We're not going to get a piece of paper from the lab saying we've found this - they're the good old easy days. We'll look back and say, ‘Ah, I didn't realize how easy it was back then.' This is new, it's complicated, they'll be hard cases to manage, particularly in the early days, but it is something we know we have to do.

VN: Will it be an electronic record, or a physical passport?

AG: An electronic record, yeah. So we're not going to give out little books and put rubberstamps in them.

VN: Will it include information gleaned from blood and urine tests already in a rider's record?

AG: We are going to have to assess that because part of making a very valid and legitimate biological passport is standardized control and standardized collection, so we will have to make an assessment as to how the samples that we‘ve currently got have been collected; and certainly those that have been collected at the right time and used in our accredited laboratories are likely to be able to be used.

VN: Talking about the forensic part of the project, and in particular the paper recently published by the scientists at the UCI- and WADA- accredited lab in Lausanne, it seems almost like a detective story, looking for clues and assessing them....

AG: And the very term forensic actually concerns that - it's a crime-scene investigation approach. And we're not running away from that. We're saying, yeah, we do need to go to these lengths. But it's a much more intelligent use of the information that we have, rather than taking the very blunt instruments we use now - just taking one sample and saying, well what does this tell us about the [blood] population out there? That's very low in sensitivity and very low in specificity as well, so this new approach gives us a much greater ability to detect those who are cheating, and a much greater ability not to pick up those with false positives. So it achieves both those things, which the current model brings us into difficulties with.



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Another part of the program will be improving the method of athletes reporting their whereabouts, so that the stepped-up program of out-of-competition testing can work successfully. At the moment, riders have to fax their planned itineraries to WADA, the UCI and/or their national federations on a three-month basis. As part of the new program, a secure Web-based reporting system will apply, so riders can update their movements whenever they have an Internet connection.

There are other possible methods, including the one being adopted by the Slipstream-Chipotle team of Jonathan Vaughters, who was in Paris for the doping summit. He told VeloNews that all of his riders will be issued with BlackBerries, which have GPS capability, so that there can be two-way communication between the riders and their team officials.

Whatever communications method is finally used will be an improvement on the current system - just as the whole biological passport program is a major step upward in cycling's renewed and reinforced determination to clean up the sport.

 

[ire]

The purpose of this card is to show what levels a rider should be at....dopers will always be ahead of testing with new doping techniques and this can help turn the tide in favor of the testers. I'm for it

 

[SPINTECK]

Yeah, but first of all , test assays are not that reliable.

Second, illness, training, altitude and such can dramatically change your blood chemistry over the course of a year.

I just think they're trying to get away from better, more expensive testing. I also find it odd that no other sport is pioneering this except cycling. Mark my word, this will be a huge was of time, energy and data. Nothing beats good testing. No doper can mask new carbon. It sounds like they are admitting they don't know the science, but if the profile looks different, then they're probably guilty.