I don’t know about you, but I was fascinated by the Lance Armstrong case.

I was one that supported him and his assertion that he wasn’t involved in anything nefarious. I know, call me gullible because I guess I have been proved seriously wrong.

What I couldn’t wrap my head around was how he passed hundreds of drug tests/doping tests and they were all negative.

Wikipedia

It was only in Lance’s recent interview with Oprah did it become clear that his undoing was the biological passport.

A biological passport is essentially a baseline of an athlete’s normal biological markers that is created over the testing of several specimens. This is then compared to data that is taken near the time of racing. If there is any strange spikes than the athlete is suspected of doping.

And this is what happened to Lance.

Evidently, they compared data of some later races (those in the late 2000’s) to his data from the Tour de France and that’s how he was first suspected.

The testing around his original Tour de France wins had much more lax testing. There were no surprise visits to the athletes home so Lance and others got very good at timing when drugs would clear their symptoms.

However, the biological passport was something they could not surpass.

Here are a few links to information about the biological passport:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_passport

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20020371

http://mashable.com/2013/01/22/biological-passport-sports-doping/

So of course, my suspense authorly mind began to consider ways the biological passport could be used for nefarious puposes. What do you think about Lance Armstrong? How do you think the biological passport could create a suspense plot?