Feasible. Work with pharmaceuticals and a fair bit of RX dust can be at the bottom of bottles. So if the pharmacist hand counted or even poured the pills into a counting machine then handled the gel caps a few minutes later I could see the potential for continuation enough to pop positive.

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I really need to keep up on all these performance enhancing items. I had no clue baking soda can boost performance. I like Impey, I have no clue whether he is telling the truth or not. I'm sure if I raced against him I would be more concerned, but I'm just a little guy in the SoCal road cycling scene. It does make me think about all the legal supplements my competitors are taking that I am missing out on.

I'm sick of the tainted supplements, meat and druggist excuses.
I'm not buying it.

baking soda is used to clear lactic acid.

How is baking soda used in cycling? Is it really common to do what he is claiming and if so, in what doses, delivery method etc? Could it be used in triathlon?

I really like Impey and Greenedge is the local team so he gets lots of coverage in Aus. But Smells like bullshit - knowing the answers to questions above would be interesting and could potentially change my mind.

As noted above, baking soda is used to supposedly neutralize lactic acid. Not a good idea in triathlon since it can induce the schitts.

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Yeah, but how much do you need, do cyclists really load their own capsules? Forgetting the cross contamination part of the story, I just want to know if what he was claiming he was doing with the capsules is likely.

It definitely does happen for real though. Which is why it is a popular excuse. Such is life.

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It's plausible and I only say that due to the evidence of from the receipts. That's a lot of contamination though to cause a positive test result.

I remember using baking soda was a fad in swimming in the 90s, not great if yoir doing a bunch of races and you end up in the can after your first one when you should be warming down. Maybe before a 2nd or 3rd event of the session.

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I can't imagine how poor the pharmacist's hygiene habits are if they had enough product on their hands to contaminate the capsules sufficiently to show a positive. I sure wouldn't want them counting my pills after a bathroom break. For me, it's too far fetched to be believable.

Hugh

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

I just want to know if what he was claiming he was doing with the capsules is likely. //

I used to live near some track guys and they would take a quart of baking soda in water, then 4 or 5 excedrin, and then a vivarin or two to top off their legal cocktail. Of course unbeknownst to me at the time, they were also doping to the gills. But this was kind of the icing on the cake so to speak, and the one they did speak of. Worked well for races up to the 4k they said.


I can see regular bike racers trying this late in a race, thus carrying it in capsules. Like the cocaine gum many of the guys would carry. Wait til the end in the last kilometers, then pop the gum in and start chewing. Leave it to bike racers to figure out a way to use these spring drugs in a 6 hour race..

Maybe the reporting is missing something, because it seems like an odd thing to lie about, but I have a hard time believing this part:

Impey explained that he needed the gel capsules to fill with bicarbonate of soda in order to fight against lactic acid in the championship race. He went early in the morning to buy them, he said, but the pharmacy did not have any. Later, the pharmacist called Impey to say that he found some and Impey returned in the afternoon to buy them.

I mean, how does a pharmacy run out of empty gel capsules? But maybe that's how they arranged the timing to get a receipt to match the time of someone else's purchase of the probenecid.

Regardless, playing with supplements is playing with fire. Skirt around the edges too closely and sometimes you get burned.

That's great advice! I have a track meet next week, have the baking soda, but where can I get that cocaine gum? Didn't see any on Amazon or Ebay?

Well, apparently The South African Institute for a Drug Free Sport bought it and that's all that really matters.

Writing my letter to Santa early this year. I've been a good boy.

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What are you people, on dope?

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If you could test positive this way, lots of people taking non-banned prescription meds would also test positive.

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yeah, soda was a fad in new zealand in the 90s too - in horse racing they called it "milk shaking" and basically they sprinkled baking soda over the field where the horses ate. it was illegal and in the 90s a few stables came in the papers for being caught doing it. so around that time a couple of runners at the club tried to drink some dissolved in water but of it tastes awful and left people bloated with gas.

i wonder how its even supposed to work since it seems like your stomach would just add more acid to balance it out before it had the chance to get to any lactic acid in your blood .

Yeah, I'm waving the BS flag on this explanation.

Who sits on the South African Institute for a Drug Free Sport? Now I'm suspicious of every South African athlete.

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

yep. I am South African and always pull for any SAFFA in any event, but I am having a problem with this one. Sounds very iffy to me.

Agree.

when I worked as a pharmacist in hospitals and retail - tablets and capsules were poured through the counters often hundreds of times a day, and the machines were rarely stripped apart for cleaning, so if contamination from previously dispensed items was likely to cause positive tests it could happen all the time - but doesn't.

Not sure I would have used the counter for empty capsule shells - I'd probably tare the bottle on the dispensary balance, drop 10 in and work out the weight I needed for the number being purchased. However, no-one ever purchased empty capsule shells when I worked as a pharmacist.

However I have a problem with the amount of contamination that could possibly be transferred from a previously dispensed item. RX tablets are designed to withstand stresses such as friction with other tablets, tumbling etc. It would be very rare for a product to lose 1% of the tablet weight in a friability test designed to evaluate this - where the tablets are tumbled in a spinning wheel with baffles for several minutes - so very little is going to be transferred to another surface during the dispensing process. It will be way less than 0.1% (probably 0%) of the tablet weight. And some fraction of this could be bound to the next product with contact on that surface. But it is going to be a tiny amount that will need an extremely sensitive test to detect. if anyone took the time they could look at the kinetics of probenicid and get a rough estimate of the amount of contamination being alleged and see if this was remotely realistic.

Probenicid is an odd choice to test positive for if it wasn't taken deliberately as a PED. In my years working as a pharmacist it was very infrequently dispensed.

Granted, it's a really odd choice. It's a steroid masker, but since it's also on the banned list, not much point in taking it unless it has some additional masking benefit such as clearing the system faster than the anabolics.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
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I call total BS. For one thing, as mentioned, if cross contamination were that easy, you'd likely hear about it way more often.
Second, his excuse about using bicarb....ridiculous.
It has been proven time and time again in studies that bicarb loading does nothing. Even I participated in a study in University over 20 years ago where they had us drink a loaded bicarb shake during one VO2 max test, and a placebo during another, and took blood samples through each test. Multiple participants. Result? No difference. And there have been many studies, thus why Cytomax's claims were such BS.
Oh, yeah, it makes total sense that a top pro cyclist believes in supplements that were proven useless 20 years ago and orders them from his pharmacist......

Not sure about where this happened but in the US probenicid is very rarely used. I'm a pharmacist and haven't dispensed it on at least two years. If someone came to me concerned about it being a contaminating agent I'd have to look to see if I even had any in stock. It would be easy to check with the pharmacy he got the caps from and see they dispensed within a couple days before he got the caps