A PIONEERING method for identifying sports cheats could potentially be good enough to be used in court.
Under the “athlete’s passport” scheme, athletes submit initial blood samples, producing a baseline profile, or passport, that subsequent samples get compared against. The hope is that this will reveal suspicious deviations in levels of certain substances – such as a dramatic increase in red blood cells – that are indicative of doping, without having to identify the illegal substance itself, which can often prove elusive.
The International Cycling Union (UCI) has been piloting the scheme. Over a year, it took around 8300 blood samples from…
