The Leak

The story of the day, at least until the AToC press conference started, was the leaked UCI document which categorized the 2010 Tour de France rider list based on how "suspicious" the UCI was of their having doped or not. Cyclingnews.com has the story here. I initially found the list fairly encouraging because so few riders were scored high on the suspicion scale.

Of course, my initial assessment makes a fairly big assumption that I wouldn't assign a probability of 1 or anything close to it. It assumes that the UCI is honest about doping and acting in good faith. I'm not a conspiracy theory theory buff but I do believe in incentives. And the UCI is has an incentive to sweep doping under the rug as much as possible. So after some reflection my initial enthusiasm is tempered.

But regardless of whether the UCI's list is accurate or not the leak itself poses a danger to anti-doping efforts. According to the reports much of the data used to determine suspicion is based on the biological passport. I don't have first-hand knowledge of the process that led to the implementation of the biological passport but it is hard to imagine that privacy concerns were not an issue. This situation reminds me a bit of the list of steroid-using ballplayers that Major League Baseball possesses. They have been under pressure for years to release the full list (it has been leaked in bits and pieces) from journalists and fans who say they have a right to know. But that list wouldn't exist if the players had not been promised that the results of the testing would be completely confidential. Releasing the list sends the message that such agreements are worthless and that the players should not trust management in future anti-doping efforts. And the leak of the UCI document does the same.

In that context it is hard to see how the leak is helpful. Either it is accurate and the riders will be more reluctant to cooperate with anti-doping efforts in the future, or it is corrupt and riders will be more reluctant to cooperate with anti-doping efforts in the future.

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