Yeah, so, on Stage 9, there was an exciting sprint. Oscar beat Robbie. Cipo was on hand. Blah blah blah. Let’s get to some climbing! GC action, right? Uh, no. Long, dull breakaway. Ag2r’s Cyril Dessel gobbled up all the KOM points, miraculously kept pace with Agritubel’s Juan Miguel Mercado over the final climb, and found himself in the yellow jersey. The Spaniard got the stage win to console himself, which probably made the Agritubel folks happy, as they’d made a paltry 1400 euros in prize money to this point. Anyway, the duo finished like 7 minutes up on the field; looks like Cyrille Guimard was right in saying T-Mobile is too weak to control the race.
Speaking of T-Mobile, it seems they’ve gotten another rider implicated in a dope affair. Except that it happened 5 years ago. But he still seems to be under investigation (I think…). So shouldn’t he be suspended, as any rider “under investigation” for doping must, under the ProTour ethics code? Normally, I’d expect the journalists reporting this story to address that issue in the article, but since it comes from l’Equipe…just more Euro dope posturing, I guess. Like this Swiss moron; comparing Puerto to BALCO? Barry Bonds is still playing baseball! Jason Grimsley, the only baseball player suspended as a result of the investigation confessed three years ago! And knowing about doping is this uninformed dickhead’s job! Of course, he also expects to find DNA in a bag of red blood cells; with troglodytes like this trying to rid sports of doping, no wonder that fans, by and large, don’t care.
Actually, packed cells would definitely have white cells included in with the red. White cells have plenty of DNA for testing, and this is the basis of many DNA tests. You really only need one white cell to do the test.
cosmo– while rbc’s are non-nucleated, I bet you could still find some genetic material in a blood bag.
Cosmo: are you sure, really really sure, that this blood won’t be DNA-testable?
I haven’t heard that these blood bags are all strictly “cleaned” RBCs. Moreover, are you sure even a nominally clean bag of blood doesn’t have enough white cells? After all, the “cleaning” is about removing plasma, not the relatively rare white cells, no?
I’m not a doctor, and maybe these bags are too clean for identification, but I also know that blood samples are routinely used for DNA extraction, so something might work on them.
FYI: there is DNA in red blood cells. Not genomic DNA but mitochondrial DNA and it can be typed just the same.