“What we must do is to ensure that the process can be reviewed and re-conducted in a way that doesn’t end up in such a disaster. It’s not fair on the athlete. We accept that.”
Peter Bol was picked for the Olympic team for Paris after running second at the National Championships last weekCredit: Getty Images
The problem for testers in EPO cases is distinguishing between synthetic, or recombinant, EPO and EPO which is naturally produced in the body.
Bol’s lawyers and scientists argued the athlete had large amounts of naturally occurring EPO and drug testers had misread this natural EPO as synthetic. Bol’s samples were reported to be a “borderline” positive.
A group of Norwegian scientists, who were long-term critics of EPO testing methods, analysed the data in Bol’s case and raised doubts about the positive drug test before the ban was overturned.
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A spokesman for the scientists, biochemist Jon Nissen-Meyer, told this masthead the new WADA changes were “somewhat improved”.
He said the changes would “to a greater extent than [the previous rules] recommend additional testing using other methods … in cases of doubt. This is also an improvement, but it may not always help”.
The scientists argue better methods for testing for EPO – using mass spectrometers to analyse proteins – should be developed because the method the WADA review validated as effective was “old-fashioned and rather unsophisticated”.
Nissen-Meyer was uncertain if the changes would help prevent another case such as Bol’s.
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“Perhaps in theory, but in practice?”
He said in Bol’s case, the Australian laboratories did use a second processing method to analyse the results and so followed the new rules.
“This enabled a more reliable interpretation of the results and revealed clearly that the A- and B-sample test results were completely identical and that they were both clearly negative for synthetic EPO.
“Thus, the Australian laboratory did in that respect a good job technically, but ironically the interpretation of the results done by the laboratory and the second opinion provided by … the WADA laboratory in Cologne was nevertheless completely wrong!”
The WADA changes were adopted at the most recent board meeting and will come into effect from June 15 this year.
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