On the eve of the Tour de France and with the Beijing Olympics just around the corner, the time couldn’t be worse to discover that the test for detecting illegal supplements of the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO) is unreliable. Because it is too late for doping authorities to alter testing regimes for either event, the worry is that cheats will go undetected.
Carsten Lundby and his colleagues at the Copenhagen Muscle Research Centre in Denmark gave a course of EPO treatment to eight healthy individuals, and then sent blood samples from each of them to two independent laboratories accredited…
