We had a blood drive at work today and they now are providing your hematacrit level during screening. The nurse said mine was 48 which she thought was high. She was concerned it was too high to donate but a colleage said it was fine. It that a typical level for active guy in his mid 40’s? Thought I read somewhere the French booted riders out of the Tour if they hit 50?
48 is higher than average but not unusual. The reading will fluctuate based on a number of factors including hydration, recent training habits, rest, etc. I just had some tests done a couple of months ago and mine fell in the normal range at 44.6. Believe it or not there’s a pretty large difference between 48 and 50 so I wouldn’t sweat it. I’m not a doc, just providing some info based on my experience.
We had a blood drive at work today and they now are providing your hematacrit level during screening. The nurse said mine was 48 which she thought was high. She was concerned it was too high to donate but a colleage said it was fine. It that a typical level for active guy in his mid 40’s? Thought I read somewhere the French booted riders out of the Tour if they hit 50?
You have a higher than average haematocrit. The UCI, the international governing body of cycling, has a cut-off of 50%, but not if you can prove your Hct is natural and not doping-enhanced. Riders who first used EPO in the late 1980’s-early 1990’s were getting their Hct’s to very high levels, making their blood so thick that when their heart rate dropped, they couldn’t pump their own blood. Many died at rest, asleep, in dentist chairs, etc. Hct can be lowered rather quickly by dilution, and all pro cycling teams have an Hct monitor on the team bus. But it was too late for these mostly German and Dutch riders back then. Bjarne Riis, the DS of Team CSC and winner of the 1996 Tour de France, recently admitted to EPO use in that Tour, and his nickname after that Tour was “Mr. 60%”. With the numerous EPO-related deaths of the 1990’s, the UCI decided to set an arbitrary safe cut-off of 50%. So riders now blood dope (EPO variants like CERA or blood transfusions) to just below that level, or dope above it then quickly dilute the blood in the half hour it takes doping control to show up after a race is over. No second test used to be performed at the Tour if the Hct was below 50%. But with the many new variants of EPO on the black market, and with genetic doping on the horizon (many people believe it’s already here), the 50% rule seems obsolete. The UCI has never really wanted to go after the dopers, and because of that, the owners of the Tour de France and the UCI have been at odds for years.