Another sport has the doping demons. News arrived that U.S. triathlete Collin Chartier has been banned for three years after testing positive for EPO, a favorite performance-enhancing drug for endurance sports.
Doping is featured in my book Numbers Rule Your World (link), written before Lance Armstrong finally admitted to doping after vehement denials for years. I made several surprising observations. Firstly, if you or I are running an anti-doping lab, we'd calibrate the test to reduce false positives at the expense of false negatives, since a doper who is getting away with it isn't going to expose our error but a falsely accused clean athlete will surely erode our reputation. Secondly, and consequently, we expect most positives to be true positives. Thirdly, a high proportion of dopers are getting away with it.
To Chartier's credit, he did not invent excuses but admitted to the offence. As reported in the article, other triathletes have paraded out the usual unlikely excuses - one even claimed that a "tainted burrito" and a "tainted Covid-19 vaccine" were responsible for the positive tests.
Now, if we believe Chartier (and many other athletes who got caught doping), he only took EPO once and only after the two greatest wins of his career. He also claimed that no one else but him knew about the doping, and his coach, who is related to the world champion of the sport, said he was blindsided by his own athlete.
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I'm still waiting for the day when an athlete shakes up the establishment by admitting all the negative tests s/he got while doping. That would take courage. Wait - Armstrong frequently said he was the most tested athlete on Earth while he was getting away with it. Does that count?
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