UCI Anabolic Steroid Thresholds: Facetious Folly

There come times in this world where the limits of human endurance are surpassed by idiotic reasoning that never should be entertained. Thus the newest logic of UCI president Pat McQuaid, who assures us with straight countenance that the WADA code of anabolic steroid strict liability should be abandoned in favor of a "threshold": based upon an arbitrary and capricious range, that would ensure performance enhancement. This is an absurd notion that would encourage the likes of Victor Conte and like minded drug innovators, who work constantly to defeat modern laboratory detection methods by introducing into athletics unknown substances and practices to cloak these substances. Better would be to leave the strict liability concept intact and instead focus on the true intent of the athlete! Accidental ingestion or mistaken use of a medicinal product that contains an ingredient listed on the WADA prohibited substance list should be forgiven as inconsequential if there was no desire upon the part of the athlete to gain an unfair advantage. There should never be any desire upon the part of athletes or their medical facilitators to manipulate anabolic steroids in ways that would ensure that laboratory tests reveal below threshold values. But under the UCI threshold argument this temptation would be ever present, in fact, a perfect danger would emerge that competition would ensue among medical experts in developing innovative tactics to ensure a below threshold value for a whole constellation of anabolic steroid drugs. In any case WADA would never agree to any threshold madness.

An introduction of threshold would also invalidate the already questionable value of the UCI Biological Passport. There are many sceptics who argue that the use of longitudinal studies purported to ferret out suspicious trends do nothing but confirm undetectable manipulations of athletic physiology by unscrupulous people. Longitudinal studies of manipulated data sets introduced by devious means do nothing to aid detection of deception, they merely facilitate cheaters. Without a clear "positive" test for a prohibited substance no number of "red flag" results can be considered "conclusive" evidence of doping. But if the insane UCI threshold proposal was allowed, then the entire passport concept would be discarded as useless because there would be a huge number of "positive" tests and the "normal" physiological values of the athlete would be taken for granted as under manipulation by any number of drugs at all times.

Idiots should remain in the asylum where they belong.