Landis admits doping, points finger at LA - Please read Mod Warning post 1

macken04 wrote: »

If he did dope it would be a disaster for cycling, fans and all the poor cancer patients who are invested in livestrong. I hope for their sake its not true

All of that makes HBOCs, on paper, anyway, far more efficient at delivering oxygen to muscles than whole blood.

It turns out they’re likely not. Dr. Michael Ashenden, founder of the Science and Industry Against Blood Doping consortium and member of the UCI bio-passport panel, told me two years ago that HBOCs never delivered the kind of oxygen-transport capacity they seemed to offer. As a result of that and their scarcity, they fell out of favor compared to less exotic regimens like blood doping and micro-dosing EPO.

But in the late 90s and early 2000s, only their advertised abilities were known. So it’s no surprise athletes wanted to get their hands on them. And Armstrong isn’t the first to have his name linked to HBOCs. When Italian anti-drug police raided the 2001 Giro d’Italia, star rider Dario Frigo was found to have stocks of HemAssist in his parents’ camper van.

Later, authorities discovered that Frigo had actually been duped: the IV bags contained nothing more than saline solution. Frigo’s clear intent was to dope but, because he never actually purchased the real drug, no one ever chased down the supply pipeline.

Similarly, Michael Rasmussen, who was accused of trying to dupe an acquaintance, Whit Richards, into unwittingly smuggling IV bags of HemoPure into Europe in 2002, was never discovered in his effort. Richards dumped the stuff in a sink drain and kept the story relatively quiet until 2006, so no one ever traced his attempts.