Ricco Admits to EPO & Flawed Testing

tridantri - 2008-07-30 11:15 AM

Ricardo Ricco has finally admitted to using EPO - his reason: "After the Giro, I had no plans to go to the Tour, and that is why I have taken the substance," Riccò said. "I made a mistake of youth."

But he does makes a very good and also very worring point: "Of the 10 controls taken, only two were positive. In theory all the tests should have been positive, therefore the method needs to be checked"

Clearly the testing procedures are not really that great and these results show that they are only working 20% of the time!

pitt83 - 2008-07-30 8:20 PM Remember, analytical tests are set up to avoid false positives. To many accusations later not confirmed or proven would be even more damaging to credibility of the testing lab. They already have image porblems (undeserved IMHO). Usually, there's a threshold of detection well above lowest limit of quantitation (LLQ). Remeber Floyd's T/E ratio? Native is 1:1 testosterone / epitestosterone, limit for positive is 4:1 T/E and his was 13:1? You REALLY need to fail these controls. That's why the "B" sample (when it's viable unlike Tyler's blood being frozen debaucle) almost never comes back negative. It confirms an already pretty slam dunk positive of the "A" sample. So yeah, Ricco might have only had 1 in 5 "A" samples exceed that limit where they're sure, but I'd bet even money they all had something above LLQ. Interesting chemistry lesson side note: I read that what did him in is the Roche adds a "marker" to Micera (The long-acting EPO Ricco used). Everyone was stunned that they found this New EPO. It wouldn't be detected by the conventional EPO test (of course; it's a different molecule than standard EPO and gets converted in vivo). They didn't; they found this tracer molecule which Roche adds to prevent counterfiting. Most drugs now contain trace marker substances making counterfitting more difficult. Roche gave them the test b/c they didn't want the bad press. http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/wada-ahead-of-the-curve-with-micera-17613[/QUOTE]

I'll throw it down here, because I can. Ricco is immature, at a minimum. We've all been there. At the max, he was a little overconfident the system wouldn't get him. Wrong, as it turned out. I'm not a fan of anyone that started the TDF knowing that they were doping and trying to cheat the system, but he got caught, and he's shared what he went through with the authorities. Props to the cheater.