> But what are the odds of 'hundreds' of tests turning out out to be false negatives?
The Tour is one of the most heavily drug-tested events in international sport, and yet it's still notorious for rampant doping. (About half of people who have finished in the top 10 in the Tour over the past decade have also been caught doping.) The odds that thousands of drug tests can be false negatives is virtually zero. . . but it's certain that they regularly fail to catch doping.
Doping is harder to catch in the Tour, because doping in multi-stage bike racing is very different from doping in most sports. It's not about taking anabolic steroids to give you the physique of a pro wrestler, it's about very carefully tweaking your metabolism to help give you just a bit more endurance than you would have otherwise, or to help you recover from the exhaustion of the previous day's stage just a bit more than you would have otherwise. There are lots of ways to do this, and many of them don't even involve drugs. For example, a nightly blood transfusion will give you more red blood cells with which to keep your muscles oxygenated.
Another popular agent, EPO, is a natural part of human metabolism that plays a part in red cell production - and it's impossible to distinguish EPO that a person's body produces from EPO that's been injected. So instead officials have just set an upper limit on how much EPO can be detectable in your bloodstream. Which essentially codifies doping as just another part of the strategy of winning the Tour: The goal is to skirt as close as you can to that limit without going over.
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> But what are the odds of 'hundreds' of tests turning out out to be false negatives?
The Tour is one of the most heavily drug-tested events in international sport, and yet it's still notorious for rampant doping. (About half of people who have finished in the top 10 in the Tour over the past decade have also been caught doping.) The odds that thousands of drug tests can be false negatives is virtually zero. . . but it's certain that they regularly fail to catch doping.
Doping is harder to catch in the Tour, because doping in multi-stage bike racing is very different from doping in most sports. It's not about taking anabolic steroids to give you the physique of a pro wrestler, it's about very carefully tweaking your metabolism to help give you just a bit more endurance than you would have otherwise, or to help you recover from the exhaustion of the previous day's stage just a bit more than you would have otherwise. There are lots of ways to do this, and many of them don't even involve drugs. For example, a nightly blood transfusion will give you more red blood cells with which to keep your muscles oxygenated.
Another popular agent, EPO, is a natural part of human metabolism that plays a part in red cell production - and it's impossible to distinguish EPO that a person's body produces from EPO that's been injected. So instead officials have just set an upper limit on how much EPO can be detectable in your bloodstream. Which essentially codifies doping as just another part of the strategy of winning the Tour: The goal is to skirt as close as you can to that limit without going over.