"Me chiamo Pedro" (My name is Pedro)

Not a story about doping, but a story, translated from El Pais, about our good friend Pedro Horrillo.

If we had more people like Pedro in cycling, and the world, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in.


"Me chiamo Pedro" (My name is Pedro)

By Carlos Arribas


Pedro Horrillo, a cyclist of 34 years, married with two young children, jumped on his bike in Morbegno, healthy and strong, a bull, at 12.08, at 14.08, he missed a left hand curve on the swift descent that finishes in di San Pietro and fell down a ravine, a vertical wall of 80 meters, at 1545, he arrived by helicopter, body wrecked, casing, unconscious, immobilized, his head surrounded by a splint, at the hospital in Bergamo, where he was admitted, in a medically induced coma into intensive care with a tube in his lungs.

In his long, infinite fall -80 metres the equivalent to a 30-story building; slowed by tree branches, which continually beat him, he broke his femur and right knee. Horrillo received a strong blow to the head which left him stunned, he broke countless ribs which were nailed to his lungs, causing pneumothorax. At no time did he stop breathing. Nor did his heart stop, his heart is heavy and big. Nor did he lose consciousness. After making three Cat scans -head, thorax and abdomen, the director of the resuscitation unit, Mariano Marchesi reserved prognosis. "Fortunately," he said, "the head injury is not as serious as we would have thought, there is no bruising or swelling, but the chest injury is very serious. He also has small fractures of vertebrae, but his is not much."

"It's a miracle," said Sergio Levi, the doctor who led the rescue. When you wake up and recover, Horrillo, lover of mountain and adventure, you will enjoy the story of Levi, "From the road we didn't see anything, but we knew someone had fallen because a bike was up against the guard rail. I tied a rope around my waist and I dropped 10 meters. We still do not see anything. Shortly afterwards came the five-member rescue team Alpine Val Brembo, with longer harnesses and ropes. we went down 60 meters, to a small sloping platform. Nothing, no trace, 'Come on, it is impossible to have fallen here, "I said to the rescue team, but one insisted on a going further and we descended 20 meters more. And they found him. On a small ridge two meters long and very narrow, lying, supine on the rocks, the cyclist. He was conscious, with neurological reflexes working, but confused and disoriented. 'What is your name? "I asked.' Me chiamo Peter. He responded in Italian ! A miracle! I do not understand how he did not stop falling earlier. He asked us to take him up, to to remove his helmet, it was suffocating him and he could not breathe. I did my resuscitation job and I waited for the arrival of the helicopter to take him out of there. Otherwise it was impossible. A few weeks ago I spoke in a rescue at Bardonecchia of a climber falling by 200 meters. It was much simpler than that. "



The doctors worked 27 minutes with Horrillo. They stabilized him, placed a tube in his lungs and opened up the pathways and induced a coma. They saved him.



On the road, the police found a long straight skid mark in the middle of the curve, the signal of his desperate braking. The director of career Babini Raffaele, who came to the hospital even before the one that won the stage, the Belarusian Siutsu, raised his arms and ordered that the music be stopped on the podium. "It is critical to the team," said his roommate, Colombian Mauricio Ardila as he held back tears. "Not only for his work on the bike but to help Menchov to make sure he is in the right group."



A writer as well as a cyclist, and habitual collaborator of the newspaper El Pais (and to this blog), Horrillo, a philosophy graduate, recently completed an autobiographical story for a book on cycling. In it he tells of a crisis of conscience, a few months in London with his friend Bruno, a start: "But I found that nothing gives me more pleasure in life than riding a bicycle. In that old steel bike that I rented from Bruno's brother I re-found the pleasure of pedaling aimlessly. No limits, no schedules, no one path to follow. That was freedom, and I am convinced that I never would have tasted it without that old bike. That old steel bike brought me back to cycling, it is true, but ironically I have never felt so full as a cyclist and in those days. Being a cyclist has little to do with it what you make of it as a profession. To be a cyclist is to find harmony between you, your bike and all that surrounds them. I found that in London, and in the years since then, only a few times have I tasted it with the same intensity. "

The Doping Dilemma and Game Theory

Article in April 2008 Scientific American Magazine entitled The Doping Dilemma

Shermer argues that Game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, baseball and other sports


Shermer's key points are that:

* An alarming number of sports—baseball, football, track and field, and especially cycling—have been shaken by doping scandals in recent years.
* Among the many banned drugs in the cycling pharmacopoeia, the most effective is recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO), an artificial hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, thereby delivering more oxygen to the muscles.
* Game theory highlights why it is rational for professional cyclists to dope: the drugs are extremely effective as well as difficult or impossible to detect; the payoffs for success are high; and as more riders use them, a “clean” rider may become so noncompetitive that he or she risks being cut from the team.
* The game theory analysis of cycling can readily be extended to other sports. The results show quantitatively how governing bodies and antidoping agencies can most effectively target efforts to clean up their sports.

More to come on this article shortly.

Beijing Positives and Fear and Self Loathing in Adelaide

Not sure what to say about this just yet.

The TDU Director excels himself. Self loathing perhaps. You can hear it here.

Beijing drug cheats still being caught

The World Today - Wednesday, 29 April , 2009 12:44:00

Reporter: Simon Santow

PETER CAVE: The boast last year that the Beijing Olympics was one of the cleanest games in decades is looking a little hollow this lunchtime.

New testing on samples taken during the competition last August has uncovered a further six alleged drug cheats.

And it's being reported that amongst the cheats there is a track and field athlete who won gold as well as a silver medallist from the cycling arena.

The International Olympic Committee has hailed the results as proof that it's getting harder to hide from ever improving drug detection technology.

At the same time sports scientists are warning that athletes and their coaches are constantly searching for new ways of gaining an unfair advantage.

Simon Santow reports.

SIMON SANTOW: In the world of elite sport, the current illegal drug of choice is a blood booster known as CERA.

And it's CERA, that's been found in the samples of six Beijing Olympians. Samples that were retested by the International Olympic Committee in the first few months of this year.

Sports scientist and anti-doping researcher Robin Parisotto.

ROBIN PARISOTTO: Blood boosting is the practice of introducing blood into, or new blood into the body or actually stimulating the body to make new blood on its own.

SIMON SANTOW: And what advantage does that give an athlete?

ROBIN PARISOTTO: Well, essentially, with more blood you can carry more oxygen and with more oxygen you have suddenly a lot more stamina which is great for endurance events.

SIMON SANTOW: And typically, what sort of sports has blood doping been used in?

ROBIN PARISOTTO: Well, primarily it has been associated with cycling. Pretty well everyone knows track and field, any endurance events like marathon running, biathlons, triathlons, those sort of events.

SIMON SANTOW: Robin Parisotto is heartened that even several months after the Beijing Games finished, cheats are still being uncovered.

ROBIN PARISOTTO: I think it is a fantastic development and it certainly shows a new way of thinking and a new way of tackling the doping problem.

SIMON SANTOW: Olympic officials now keep samples for eight years to allow for advances in testing and to warn athletes that cheating will eventually catch up with them.

While the names of those caught this time are yet to be publicly released, media around the world are reporting they include a cyclist who won silver, and a gold medal winning track and field athlete.

All up 5,000 competitors were tested during the games and since the beginning of the year about a fifth of those frozen samples were re-tested for CERA using technology found to be effective in weeding out cycling drug cheats in recent months.

MIKE TURTUR: It sickens me and it angers me that these athletes try to worm their way out of being detected. I am glad to see that these athletes are being found and there are no other compromise that can be made and these idiots that do cheat, really are the criminals of sport.

SIMON SANTOW: Mike Turtur won a gold medal for Australia in the 1984 Los Angeles Games in the 4,000 metres team pursuit cycling.

These days he's the race director for the cycling race Tour Down Under. He's also the regional representative on the board of the world cycling body, UCI.

MIKE TURTUR: There will be more cheats detected. There is no question because this is human nature that we are talking about and fame and fortune does some unique things to people. They lose perspective of reality and they get consumed with their own thing.

SIMON SANTOW: He says he's still shocked that cyclists who cheat haven't got the message about doping and testing.

MIKE TURTUR: I can't find the words to describe these idiots. I mean the fact of life is that they will be caught sooner or later and the storing of samples is a huge advantage in respect to that. But drug cheats, in my view, are people that have a serious problem.

They are the most selfish people that you can be associated with because they don't care about anything except themselves.

SIMON SANTOW: Sports scientists such as Robin Parisotto believe that cheating will go on because the odds are still stacked in favour of the clever cheat.

ROBIN PARISOTTO: Just in the case of blood doping with the detection of six new positive cases with a new version of EPO called CERA doesn't mean that there is no other drugs out there.

SIMON SANTOW: In the race between the drug detectors and the people prepared to use the drugs, who is winning at the moment?

ROBIN PARISOTTO: Look, I would have to say that the testers are really gaining some ground on the cheats, but this needs to be tempered by the fact that just with blood doping agents, there are at least 80 other agents out there which I am not sure there are tests for at the moment. So there is always going to be a battle.

PETER CAVE: Anti doping researcher and sports scientist, Robin Parisotto ending that report from Simon Santow.

One more death

Carlos Arribas the doyen of Spanish cycling journalism has a piece in El Pais today on the sad death of Jobie Dajka.

In the same edition my open letter has been published in Spanish.

The only other brave people to publish the open letter were the guys in new York at Velocity Nation and Doug at the Doug Report - see his April Wednesday 8th Archive.

Mr Adams Conference in Denmark - Doping and legal rights 20 - 21 August 2009

The conference theme of “Doping and Legal Rights” addresses the present large‐scale supervision of elite athletes in connection with the fight against doping in elite sport. With the publication of the most recent version of the World Anti-Doping Code in January 2009 high profile athletes have begun to speak out in protest against the regime. Recently 65 athletes in Belgium have decided to challenge the legality of the system. The reason is not – they stress – that they are against doping control but because they find that the whereabouts system violates their right to privacy. In light of the evolving critique from athletes on the whereabouts system, the International Network of Humanistic Doping Research finds it timely to initiate a debate on “Doping and Legal Rights”. Internationally renowned legal experts, sociologists and philosophers will present and discuss sports law and related issues such as whereabouts, right to privacy, and the challenges that could arise from false positive test results.

International Network of Humanistic Doping Research
Department of Sport Science
University of Aarhus
Denmark