Can Biological “Passports” Root Out Doping in Sports?
Cycling, a sport that rivals or surpasses baseball in credibility issues when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, is taking a new scientific tack in a bid to polish its tarnished image. The sport’s international governing body, the International Cycling Union (UCI), has been murmuring to the press that doping charges are forthcoming—and soon—courtesy of a newly instituted anti-doping measure known as the biological passport. The passport is an electronic record of an individual athlete’s biological attributes, developed over time from multiple sample collections. (During the 2008 season, the UCI collected an average of 10 samples each from more than 800 cyclists.) Rather than ordinary spot-testing approaches, which look for unnatural ratios between biological constituents in a single sample or for direct chemical evidence of known doping agents, the passport allows investigators to see the big picture—any deviations from the rider’s test-established norm that might result from dop