Friday, July 28, 2006

Now They Come On Cycles?

"Elevated" levels of testosteone, that is. Except is really isn't the actual testosterone count that matters, but the relationship between T and other values. A few months back, the drug enforcement agencies that monitor such things said that the levels triggering doping alarms were too low, meaning that men who have not taken anabolic steroids or pure testosterone itself had levels as high or higher than the cutoff point, and could be unfairly accused of cheating.

Too bad for Floyd Landis and his Tour de France victory. The accusatory concentration remains the same, for the time being, and while I'm not saying that he was clean, there's enough medical evidence to suggest that testing parameters are so far out of whack as to create a reasonable doubt. Good athletes can have natural concentrations that are unacceptable under the current standards, but so very many (nearly all) of the intitial tests were conducted on European men and it's no wonder the standards are so relatively low. They should return to a nanograms per deciliter detection system, and this time around use full-functioning males of the species as reference standards.

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