Jack3d and Claire Squire's death

The coroner has spoken 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-21262717

I completely agree

http://runswimthrowcheat.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/jack3d-not-worth-risk-in-all-sorts-of.html

My sympathies are with Claire's family and friends at this time. I do note that the new Jack 3D has been launched without the offending DMAA (methylhexanamine) ingredient.  The current ingredients look pretty harmless, but it is interesting they think the brand name is not tarnished and worth reusing.

The new ingredients of Jack 3D "ENOS Super Performance System"are L-citrulline, arginine and nitrate [1]. A weird combination of substrates, precursors and products of the enzyme Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase (hence the ENOS). As someone who has written a scientific review on this enzyme with over 2,000 academic citations (http://www.biochemj.org/bj/357/0593/3570593.pdf), I wish supplement companies would just leave my field alone and find somewhere else to go to peddle their non validated concoctions.

A bit more of a rant than usual I'm afraid, but this death was so unnecessary....


 [1]  Nitrate can have a performance effect but you can get it cheaper by eating a lot of vegetables (or drinking beetroot juice).

Lance Armstrong: the science fights back

Michael Ashenden agrees with that that Lance Armstrong is lying about not doping in his comeback Tour in 2009/2010 (or I guess we both agree with Chris Gore).
 See Matt Slater’s story at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/21195249 It’s nice to be in such good company. People talk about Oprah not asking the difficult questions. She actually didn’t do too bad. But if the science of doping was in her blood (so to speak) she could have pointed out the anomaly with him supporting the blood passport’s accuracy, whilst seemingly making an exception in his own case. I think a Jeremy Paxman or a John Humphrys might have got this point. 
I think Armstrong still needs to be pressed on this point.

We shouldn't forget that Armstrong pulled out, ostensibly for legal and financial reasons, of Don Caitlin's widely publicised personalised anti doping program that was scheduled for his comeback Tour. It would have been very interesting to compare Caitlin’s proposed every three day testing regime with the more limited data from USADA and UCI that seem to damn him.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/sports/othersports/12cycling.html?_r=0

Swansea City ball boys

OK - this is not about drugs in sport, but I couldn't resist it:

In 1973 Swansea City  became the first team in football's lower leagues to have ball boys.

In the first batch was a certain Chris Cooper

I have two main memories:

1 We were ordered to all go to the side of the pitch nearest the tunnel for the last 10 minutes of the match so we didn't get run over when the skinheads invaded the pitch at the end of every game (this was the 70s after all). 

Oh and 

2 We were told to give the ball back quickly if Swansea were losing and very slowly if we were winning. And to try and avoid getting beaten up by frustrated opposition players in the latter case.

I was born 40 years too early - or I could have been famous ……  (or at least kicked by somebody famous) 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/eden-hazard-sent-off-for-kicking-ball-1552195

Was Lance Armstrong lying to Oprah Winfrey?

To quote Gordon Farquhar at the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/21085940

“Armstrong is an accomplished liar. Serious questions remain over the analysis of blood tests taken from Armstrong in 2009 and 2010 following his comeback. Usada says the tests "built a compelling argument consistent with blood doping. Armstrong has not yet admitted to doping on his return to the sport in 2009. Wada president John Fahey doesn't buy Armstrong's assertion that he was clean during his comeback. Tests were carried out on 38 of his blood samples from that time by the Australian Institute of Sport, which concluded that the chances of the blood values recorded occurring naturally were one in a million. The tests were not part of the recognised anti-doping programme, but Fahey wants Armstrong under oath again on this”.

I couldn’t agree more. In his Oprah interview Armstrong makes the case that the sport is cleaner and it is harder to cheat because of out-of-competition testing and the athlete biological passport. Yet as I have said on this blog before, his blood samples in 2009 and 2010 were highly suspicious. The data that makes them suspicious (plasma volume, reticulocyte count) are the same that would raise warnings on the passport. This is the basis for the “one in a million” comment from Prof. Chris Gore mentioned in the above quote.

If Lance Armstrong was not lying to Oprah and he was in fact clean in 2009 and 2010, it calls into question the whole biological passport system. The only resolution is for Armstrong to work with UCI, WADA and Chris Gore to explore how such anomalous blood results could have occurred by chance. As some have suggested on my blog (step forward “anonymous”) perhaps he used hypoxic tents in Italy? If we don’t know how this happened there could be a whole lot of “false positive” passport results and athletes could be accused unnecessarily.

Or perhaps Armstrong was just lying? It has been known

Lance Armstrong on the Oprah Winfrey Show

I can’t wait to hear the 112 questions Oprah tried to ask Lance Armstrong. None of them I think are likely to be the ones scientists want to know (or at least this scientist). So here are my alternative questions?

1               Who designed his doping program (though we can all guess this)?

2               Was his program more sophisticated than his rivals?

3               How was it evidence-based? For example was the performance titrated individually versus body haemoglobin or was there just an optimum hemoglobin concentration that the all the climbers in the team aimed for?

4               We know how blood doping worked. But what benefit did he feel he get from steroids (both corticoid and anabolic)? How was this evidence-based?

5               Did some people get doped and still not perform better?

6               Was the Armstrong phenomenon in part that he was ideally suited to being doped i.e. was blood oxygen content more rate limiting for his performance than his rivals?

Oprah won’t ask these of course (and to be fair they are not really prime time TV questions)

But she might ask these two

1                                 Would he still have win seven Tours if nobody was doping?

2                                 Would he still have win seven Tours if everyone had the same doping team?

On a non-science level I hope he doesn’t leave any grey areas about his moral standing. He should come as clean as Landis and Hamilton. I won’t hold my breath, however. 

Sports personality of the year: what’s it got to do with drugs in sport?

Athletes as role models

Tonight in Britain the BBC will host a veritable orgy of UK sport self-aggrandizement as it celebrates its Sports Personality of the Year Award. And why not? 2012 has been a year like no other. The short list has been extended from ten to twelve [1] and includes eleven Olympic and Paralympic gold medallists (many with more than one gold) the Tour de France winner, US open tennis champion and the US PGA golf champion who heads the current money list in both Europe and the USA. The complete short list is: Nicola Adams, Ben Ainslie, Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah, Katherine Grainger, Sir Chris Hoy, Rory McIlroy, Andy Murray, Ellie Simmonds, Sarah Storey, David Weir and Bradley Wiggins. Double Olympic gold medallists Charlotte Dujardin and Laura Trott didn’t even make this top 12.

So there is no doubt we have an elite set of athletes who are role models for being single minded in achieving success. And I should add coaches as the UK cycling supremo David Brailsford could walk into a top job in any FTSE 100 company given his organizational and motivational skills.

But should these athletes be role models in life as well as in sport? During the summer here was much grumbling about the lifestyle and uncouth nature of premiership footballers compared to our Olympic heroes. Indeed even the crowds were different as I noted when I watched Team GB playing football at Wembley compared to England. Watching football at the Olympics was an altogether more wholesome experience, not least because of the much higher proportion of women and children in the crowd. The feeling was more good-natured and less tribal – much more like watching an “American” football or baseball match [2].

We should be careful not to view this all through middle class rose-tinted spectacles. Some of my best experiences of watching football have been standing in the terraces at a lower league English football match when your side scores the winning goal and the stadium literally rocks. And UK Olympic gold medallists are far more likely to come from privileged private school backgrounds than their premiership football counterparts [3].

Yet the question remains should we look up to our elite sports people as role models for life as well as sports performance? I have always thought we should take athletes on their own terms, warts and all. If they play or run fast, I don’t care about their personal life or habits. Ryan Giggs may have an unsavoury love life but, even though he plays football for Manchester United, I can still admire him as an athlete.

How does this relate to drugs in sport? Well in order to be banned a doping agent or method needs to fail two out of three tests. The three tests are that it is: performance enhancing; harmful to health; and against the “spirit of sport”. The latter is defined by the World Anti Doping Agency” as the celebration of the human spirit, body and mind, characterized by values such as: Ethics, fair play and honesty; Health; Excellence in performance; Character and education; Fun and joy; Teamwork; Dedication and commitment; Respect for rules and laws; Respect for self and other Participants; Courage; Community and solidarity. Motherhood and apple pie were surprisingly left of this list, but you can get the drift of this message.

Recreational drugs are banned in many sports even though there is no good data that they are performance enhancing (cocaine springs to mind). But they are still harmful to health and against the spirit of sport. Two strikes means you are out. Giving evidence to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in 2006 the then UK Minister of Sport Richard Caborn said that he would wish to “look very seriously” at the Prohibited List with a view to removing what he believes are “social drugs”. The Minister felt that WADA’s role was to root out cheats in sport and to stop athletes using drugs which enhance performance, rather than to be in the “business of policing society” [4].

What do people think today? I assumed that Richard Caborn’s views would be commonplace. I was therefore surprised when I asked the question of to my University of Essex undergraduate students. They were strongly of the opinion that elite athletes are role models and therefore if they are caught taking recreational drugs they should be banned from sport. Of course it is possible that those who spoke up in the lecture were the most anti-drug, but I didn’t get that impression. It seems the youth of today do really care about their sportspeople as more than just athletic machines. They want them to be great people as well as great athletes. Not for the first time in my 50^th decade, I felt a bit out-of-touch with young people and somewhat humbled by their idealism.

Notes

[1]  http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/sports-personality/19886193

[2] I should note in passing that there was nothing quite so wholesome about some of the football. Senegal were one of the dirtiest teams I have ever watched. It was a bit like watching Holland play Spain in the last world cup final - the most brutal tackles you would see in a Sunday pub league intermixed with the silky skills of a top premiership club.

[3]        http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/aug/13/olympics-2012-gb-medallists-private-schooling

[4]        http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmsctech/67/67.pdf

Taking drugs in the cause of public engagement in science

A prophet is welcome in his own country! This is just a belated note to thank everyone who turned up at the Café Scientifique event in Colchester a couple of weeks ago. Café Scientifique run great popular science events and it was brilliant to give a talk in my current hometown after traipsing all over the country promoting the book. And what better place than the Love Bistro? As usual a great array of questions  - though it is always a danger when they let the clinicians in as they think they know more than the rest of us (OK in many cases they actually do, but I like to keep an aura of my own scientific mystique). Anyway I advertised live performance enhancing drug taking though pseudoephedrine, caffeine and alcohol may not have been quite what the audience was expecting. Still my demonstration of blood doping using red wine seemed to go down well. Next time I’ll inject, but drinking is so much more fun…..

So what about the science? Well taking all those drugs led me to think I really have got to see if they work. One of my undergraduate students is doing a meta-analysis on the performance benefits – or not – of pseudoephedrine, the stimulant that was banned, unbanned and then re-banned by WADA. The scientific reviews I cited in my book were not convinced of its efficacy; let’s see if the most recent data is more convincing. I’ll report back when I have the data.