Any pro cyclist knows the testing system: this knowledge is underlined and enforced at every dope test. Tom being a successful tester had many reminders to be professionally cautious and aware. So guilty sadly… Yes.

I agree with BikePure. Something needs to help our broken sport, a forceful hand is required to clean it up.
To the punishment…. Any reprimand, MUST be a deterrent to future temptation. Any cyclist who reads these opinions will triple check the plastic bottles in the kit bag in future.

Please take the opportunity to read my post at ciclirati.wordpress.com. Yes, I go after you a bit because if you peel away your words, you don’t believe Tom and think he’s lying about his knowledge and/or intent.

I think there is an equally large elephant in the room when it comes to the unregulated supplement industry that can cause these DHEA positives. Tyler wanted to get caught, I don’t know about the other, but feel strongly knowing the facts and probabilities out there that Tom didn’t know. He’s truly been forthcoming with information on his situation and I hope he could possibly discover how this non-performance enhancing banned substance sidetracked his career.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jamesstout: good article on DHEA from @BikePure http://bit.ly/aAGrpX...

Please don’t get me wrong but would you blindly follow WADA’s rules if it forbade, for example, carbohydrates? They also enhance performance, don’t they? In my point of view, a substance should be banned ONLY when it is potentially harmful. Caffeine is also a performance enhancer (and I guess you don’t question this) but it is allowed because it is generally not dangerous. I think the real question here is not whether we want to allow doping (because we all here know that we shouldn’t) but whether taking DHEA should really be considered a cheat bigger than taking caffeine.

Again: I do not try to defend Zirbel because it seems like he cheated (assuming that he did it knowingly). The real question is whether DHEA should really be forbidden. It seems like it is no more “enhancing” or dangerous than, say, caffeine.

I’m happy to do so. While I share the feelings that the sport needs to be cleaned up, I also feel that we need to do it without resorting to a witch hunt and without resorting to ruining the careers and possibly lives of athletes. In order to do this we need to make sure that the science behind any conviction is rigorous and we also need to make sure that the punishments for violations fit the crimes. A two-year suspension for first time use of EPO-Cera may be quite reasonable, while the same suspension for a chemical that shows no benefit to performance and that is a common unlabeled contaminant in food supplements sold at your local discount store is clearly an excessive punishment.

To begin, try doing a Google search for P.J. Skerret who is cited in the BikePure article. The top hit will be Quackwatch.com with an article from a newsletter produced by The New England Journal of Medicine explaining how “…there’s no convincing evidence for any benefit of DHEA…”

Furthermore, the study from the New York Academy of Sciences sounds like an excellent peer-reviewed source. And it surely is, but it is not on the subject we are discussing. The study was about DHEA use as an anti-aging supplement rather than an ergogenic aid. The study commonly gets misused by retailers trying to increase sales of DHEA as it is possibly the only one that implies you will get a benefit from using DHEA.

The rest of the scientific literature is much more likely to point out that using DHEA will actually harm your athletic performance. The most cited study on DHEA as a sports supplement is by Mark Juhn in Sports Medicine. He says “The androgenic precursors androstenedione and dehydroepiandrosterone [DHEA] have not been shown to increase any parameters of strength and have potentially significant adverse effects.”

In the November 1, 2008 edition of The American Family Physician: A peer reviewed journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians it says, “[A]ndrostenedione and DHEA are marketed as being able to build muscle and increase strength by increasing serum testosterone. However, supplementation has not been shown to increase testosterone levels, strength, or performance in clinical studies. Androstenedione supplementation was not able to increase strength as measured by a one-repetition maximal bench press or by total weight lifted per workout. DHEA did not increase mean strength over weeks of supplementation. Adverse effects of androstenedione and DHEA include a sustained increase in serum estrogen…”

Michael S. Bahrke and Charles Yesalis site multiple studies dealing with DHEA in their book Performance-enhancing Substances in Sport and Excercise. The studies showed that DHEA didn’t enhance skeletal muscle, DHEA didn’t effect energy expenditure or protein metabolism, and DHEA doesn’t play an important role in energy metabolism.

In a 2006 article on ergogenic aids in young athletes from Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics they say, “those who received the drug showed no change in any athletic measure…In the literature to date, there is no convincing evidence that these prohormones have any true benefit for the athletes…”

As to the claims that any serious athlete would know if he or she ingested DHEA, the British Journal of Sports Medicine addressed the issue in its November 2007 issue in the article “The continuing story of nutritional supplements and doping infractions”. The article begins by saying, “Nutritional supplements can be a source of positive doping cases as some supplements contain prohibited substances without showing this on their label. This problem has existed for some time and has been extensively studied in the past 8 years.”

They go on to say, “…that paper-based quality systems are still prone to possible contaminations, which leads to the conclusion that the best possible solution for athletes who wish to use nutritional supplements must include laboratory-based analysis for doping substances, preferably repeated for every new batch.”

WADA knows that supplement contamination is a huge problem but choses to ignore it. As the BJSM reports from WADA’s own study, “This study showed that 14.8% of 634 freely available substances contained anabolic agents that were not declared on the label.” Yes, that is right, you have almost a 1 in 6 chance of getting a supplement contaminated with something on WADA’s banned list that is not on the supplement label.

And these contaminants didn’t just show up in supplements marketed to boost performance such as muscle-building protein powders and recovery drinks, they showed up even in simple vitamin pills due to cross-contamination from the manufacturer.

I think once you actually look at the scientific evidence on DHEA in sport and supplement contamination you really have to wonder about whether Tom deserves any punishment in this case beyond what he has already suffered. At the least, you have to doubt whether the same punishment can be appropriate for this case and an EPO-Cera case. So, let’s stop this crucifixion of Tom and put our energies toward cleaning up our sport without ruining lives without scientific basis.

-CB