Hamilton decision expected on Monday

Triathlon Forum
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Hamilton decision expected on Monday

*By Cyclingnews staff *

The long awaited decision on the Tyler Hamilton blood doping case should be out very soon, according to sources within the UCI. “The verdict is expected to be announced on Monday,” confirmed a senior UCI source to Cyclingnews this weekend.

While the official said he had no idea which way the verdict would go, there is some speculation within US cycling that Hamilton will not only be cleared, but that he could even line up in the Tour of Georgia this week.

“I’ve heard a rumour that Tyler Hamilton may be part of the race,” said a prominent US rider today. “The decision is imminent, and the talk over here is that he is going to get off. A rumour is a rumour, but that is what some have been saying.”

If so, the verdict will be a massive boost for the Marblehead rider and a big setback to the UCI and WADA, who have insisted all along that the test for homologous blood doping, introduced in time for the Olympic Games last Summer, was 100% reliable.

Hamilton returned positive tests for blood transfusions on two occasions last year, firstly after winning the Olympic title and then during the Vuelta a España. He was later allowed keep his gold medal when the ‘B’ blood sample from Athens was found to have been incorrectly stored by officials, preventing any verification of the initial result.

Hamilton has maintained his innocence from the start, vowing to take the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland should the initial ruling go against him. For their part, the UCI and WADA have been equally adamant that the test is watertight and provided proof of doping.

Hamilton’s hearing with the USADA began in Denver on February 27 and continued until March 2. A ruling was expected within a couple of weeks, but no verdict has been delivered in the month and a half since. Some observers have seen the delay as an indication of doubt about the test’s reliability.

Should Hamilton indeed be cleared on Monday, the case is unlikely to end there. “The UCI will wait and see what happens in America, with regards to the verdict. If necessary, we will take it to CAS after that,” said the UCI official.

So, even if the Olympic TT champion does line out in Augusta on Tuesday for stage one of the 2005 Dodge Tour of Georgia, the battle may be far from over.

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I think that T. H. seems like a stand up guy, but being a slow fat age grouper… I really can’t grasp the pressure that pro cyclist are under…

That said.

ARE THESE TESTS ACCURATE OR NOT? It seems as though every stinking time that an individual tests positive on their A or A/B samples… they cry “not me!.. never did I ever… I will be proven inocent…”

If these Tests are accurate for detecting cheats then great… They should own up and stop whining.

If these tests are not accurate 99.9 % of the time, then they are worthless.

my .02

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What if you are the .1% that the test screws up? Would you be willing to bet your livelihood on a test that isn’t 100% accurate?

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99% accuracy on these tests would suggest double-digit (at least) false positives in any calendar year.

Those just aren’t good enough odds IMHOP, to discount the possibility that many riders have been the victim of anomalous results.

Some interesting reading, if slightly off-topic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/international/africa/17angola.html?

From todays NY Times, an article on the Marburg virus outbreak in Angola. At the very beginning of the outbreak, there were a minimum of FOUR negative results for patients infected with the disease.

Now, at least 230 people have died, and they know that the outbreak they are facing is indeed Marburg - a disease that has a fatality rate of nearly 90%.

Over a dozen health care workers have died so far.

All of the initial test results showed ngative for this disease.

This is a failure in testing accuracy that clearly, emphatically outweighs every false positive in the history of athletics - yet, it begs the question; if there can be such a colossal, disastrous failure in testing when hundreds of lives are at stake, how can anyone discount the possibility of a false test result in the ultimately mundane world of athletics?

.

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There were a couple of threads on this about a month ago. The key thing to remember right now about ‘these tests’ is that the type of test used in Hamilton’s case is fundamentally different than the other drug tests. Tests for EPO, steroids, etc., are testing for presence/levels of specific metabolic molecules. The blood doping test used in Hamilton’s case is actually a series of tests that work by getting designed proteins to either attach or not to antigens on the surface of red blood cells. The science behind the accuracy of a steroid test can’t be used to predict anything about the blood doping tests.

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Speaking of TH, I saw him motor pacing on Friday - really moving I must add. He had a smile on his face and looked pretty motivated. I think he has an inkling what the ruling will be. Maybe it’s just me, but I would find it hard to train that hard, knowing I wouldn’t be able to race again.

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<Speaking of TH, I saw him motor pacing on Friday - really moving I must add. He had a smile on his face and looked pretty motivated. I think he has an inkling what the ruling will be. Maybe it’s just me, but I would find it hard to train that hard, knowing I wouldn’t be able to race again. >

Thats what I’ve been thinking. He is either innocent or knows he is going to beat the system if he is training as hard as I’ve been hearing.

Or here really likes to ride. I guess he might not have anything better to do. Maybe he’ll race MTB next year with Lance.

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btw, not sure this matters, but he was in his full-in team uniform too.

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yep, and nina, rutger, katja are all racing soon…with full sponsors etc.
what-ever…he tested positive twice and actually 3 times but one test was just cancelled…

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Sounds like even if the USADA clears him, the UCI is going to fight it. I’m guessing that means he wouldn’t be able to race in Europe for some time. No matter what the verdict, I bet the chances of seeing him race the Tour and the other big races in Europe this year are slim.

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yep, and nina, rutger, katja are all racing soon…with full sponsors etc.
what-ever…he tested positive twice and actually 3 times but one test was just cancelled…

C’mon, Francois, be open-minded a bit on this one for a moment. I’m just as against drug use, blood doping, etc. in sports as you are, but what little has been put out in public forums on this one makes me wonder if this new test has been perfected. This isn’t based on who tested positive, but rather the science behind it. Or, rather, the mention that there were some new, ‘unidentified antigens’ that were incorporated into the test. Has the science of this been fully peer reviewed outside of the developing organization?

There’s an analogy to this in the software development arena: each different drug test is the equivalent of its own piece of software, with its own design, coding, debugging, and QA. Ever had one of those “why the heck did the code do that?” Have you ever written a piece of code that misbehaved repeatedly in the same way, and it turned out that a slightly different input to it caused it to behave in a way you never predicted? And what if you didn’t QA it enough prior to putting it in the field? Well, you now have a bug that needs fixing.

Same deal with the new test for blood doping (actually, a set of tests with different proteins) Although based on well-tested technology (ABO, RH tests), and having published some of the new proteins they’ve added, by their own admission there are some antigens being tested for that haven’t been published. If there hasn’t been enough outside peer review of these additional antigens, perhaps there’s a scientific reason (other than doping!) that Hamilton’s blood is testing positive repeatedly. What if one of the binding proteins behaves unexpectedly and only binds to some, but not all, cells for a given sample? You’ll get a false positive on it. Well, you now have a bug that needs fixing.

Once again, I’m not taking any position on either side; I’m waiting for the jury of scientists to decide whether there is any good, acceptable-to-the-general-scientific-community evidence that indicates a problem with one or more of the proteins or testing processes used in this ‘test’. And whatever the results come out as for this specific test, they don’t necessarily say anything about the validity of any of the other tests.

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I’m not sure you can read anything in his training other thn optimism. The season has started and if he hopes to do well he better be traing. Besides if he is cleared and comes into the season out of shape everyone here is going to have a field day, " See he’s not doping and he’s slow now!"

Styrrell

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what-ever…he tested positive twice and actually 3 times but one test was just cancelled.

do you think it’s possible that he would always test positive in this test even if he’d been sitting on the couch for a year? That really would prove it to be flawed.

Testing positive 3 times in a flawed test doesn’t mean much.

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How about two guys from the same team testing both positive when all the other riders tested were negative?
likelihood?

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you mean any two guys from any team - not as low as you might think
.

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Doesn’t the whole blackmail ordeal/arrest bug anyone? Why haven’t we heard more about it? I’ve become more skeptical of Hamilton since, by all accounts, his argument is about the test being flawed, but you can’t dismiss the fact that a man attemtpted to, or actually did, extort money from Phonak by “threatening” positive tests on it’s two star riders. I mean, the dude called his shot long before either tested positive! I want to know more about that before making any judgements, and I wonder if that has had something to do with the delay?

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you don’t think it’s pretty strange that two guys (Hamilton and Perez) from the same team (Phonak) tested positive to the same doping thing (blood doping) when no other riders in other team did test positive to blood doping?
I sure do…

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What if you are the .1% that the test screws up? Would you be willing to bet your livelihood on a test that isn’t 100% accurate?

Isn’t that why there are two samples, and two tests? For an athlete to get two false positives from his sample, the chance rises to 1 in 10,000. Pretty long odds. Plus TH got picked up at the Olys and subsequently. Start factoring all the tests, and the odds of all his tests being false positives get really big.

You want an idea of what sort of a long shot 1 in 10000 is? If someone said to you that they’d give you $1 million if you could pick up exactly 5000 grains of sand on your first go, and if you goofed you’d have to pay them that amount, would you take the bet? If you assume that the most sand grains you can hold is 6000 (and I have no idea how many it is) then your chances of winning that bet are 6000 to 1. Better odds than TH’s results being false positives.

Of course, this discounts the possibility that the test used on TH is itself inherently flawed, but then if it was, you’d expect to see results which themselves suggest a much greater error rate than 1 in 100.

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I share your suspiscions Francois… if Hamilton is cleared I truly hope they give a good explanation for all of this. If we get some short, vague comment about how the test was new and/or unreliable, I’m probably assume he was dirty and got off on a technicality.

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I share your suspiscions Francois… if Hamilton is cleared I truly hope they give a good explanation for all of this. If we get some short, vague comment about how the test was new and/or unreliable, I’m probably assume he was dirty and got off on a technicality.

++++++++++++++++

Let’s be clear. The only way he’s getting off is on a legal technicality. His defense in today’s paper was an “invisible twin”–a defense more appropriate for a daytime soap opera than a world class athlete. I wonder how many other previously sacntioned athletes were duped by evil twins. At least he didn’t play the race card.

–wh