Better than the usual “contaminated food” excuse… 
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Contaminated meat 
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That’s nuts!
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Guys, let’s be kind. I’m sure it was already tough enough to swallow.
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The potential for sexual transmission of drugs is part of my day-to-day work (in the context of risks of clinical research studies). It is possible with some drugs, including this one, and there is actually prior precedent in the context of testing of elite athletes
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I’m seem to remember Floyd Landis claiming his high testosterone level was because his girlfriend visited him before the stage.
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Thanks for the info….always good to learn something new.
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Enough to trigger a positive sample? I mean Dennis Mitchell used the “sex and beer” excuse all the way back in 1999. So nothing new.
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The potential might be there… just like the potential to eat contaminated meat but let’s be real. These legal defenses are ridiculous and IMO she shouldn’t have been messing with someone known to be using banned substances. Have some accountability.
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Not a pharmacologist, but there is actually a fair amount of work being done on the plausibility, for example: Sexually transmitted doping: The impact of urine contamination of semen - PMC
The context in which I deal with this is “Is there a chance this drug is present in semen in high enough levels to justify requiring a male participant in this study to use condoms as a condition of participation in order to avoid the risk of an embryo or fetus being exposed?” which sometimes reaches absurd levels (like requiring men with castration-resistant prostate cancer, who by definition can’t produce sperm but can make semen, to use condoms if they are able to have an erection). For most drugs, this requirement goes away and very few approved drugs, at least in the US, require male contraception (one exception is thalidomide and its derivatives, where men who are prescribed them are required to sign a form agreeing to use condoms).
The potential theoretically possible mechanisms I can see here are
–Contamination of the athlete’s urine sample with semen: Complementary information concerning the suspected interindividual transmission of GW1516, a substance prohibited in sport, through intimate contact: a case report | Forensic Toxicology
–Direct transmission of the drug through semen; this is going to be dependent on the concentration (hence the study I linked to which looks at the possibility that the seminal fluid contains some urine, which would lead to higher concentrations) and efficiency of absorption. Drugs can be absorbed through the vagina, although not as efficiently as rectally; I think of sexual transmission of drugs as analogous to transmission of viral STIs like HIV/hepatitis–for any given level in semen, blood levels in the partner are always going to be higher after nonvaginal intercourse than vaginal, so the type of sexual activity probably plays a role as well. If this mechanism is possible, then the risk of inadvertent exposure would actually be higher with gay athletes.
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Would your point of view be different if her partner were on prescribed TRT? What if she’s trying to get pregnant? Ultimately, she will be accountable for her actions, but this is getting into the personal lives of an athlete that I think is private, except she has now has to explain herself.
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I get your point. I just think a lot of us have been watching the sport long enough to be suspicious of these “I drank coffee whose beans passed through a tainted dung beetle” excuses. That leads to (possibly inappropriate) sarcastic replies. If she’s innocent, I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong for my sarcasm.
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So this thread has actually become an interesting discussion…which is cool since I started it as a sarcastic response.
I think one of the things that have come about recently is that the accuracy and specificity of the testing has increased well past the limits of what gets triggered as a positive / false negative / anomaly at the testing labs.
As testing becomes more accurate, it seems we need to revise the trigger point for testing anomalies. There are clearly cases of athletes dealing with contaminated food and you can only take the “you’re responsible for what you put in your body” so far. Otherwise, you are asking athletes to never eat in a restaurant, keep samples of every single thing they ever consume, etc.
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No, it wouldn’t change. If you want to be a professional athlete, it’s your responsibility to separate yourself from banned substances. The athletes are responsible for knowing what could potentially cause cross contamination.
Otherwise every professional athlete should just find a partner using prohibited substances knowing they could potentially benefit.
This is making a lot of relatively misogynistic assumptions about what people know about their partners, and about relationship dynamics that could affect this particular risk in a number of ways. It’s also not clear to me that, despite a number of cases and some ongoing scientific inquiry, that this particular mechanism is widely known, as evidenced by the initial responses; there’s nothing at all I can find on the WADA or USADA web pages about sexual transmission.
I would also be willing to put a very large bet that the amount of any given drug that was absorbed through vaginal intercourse would have no detectable effect on athletic performance.
I’m also very willing to bet, albeit a smaller amount, that everyone who has commented so far is male.
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The Lizzie Banks story is a good example of this (very long read but interesting if you have time https://lizzybanks.co.uk/)
FWIW I’d be about as confident of her being clean as I could be about any athlete I don’t personally know. Been on the Cycling Podcast a lot over the years, comes across as a smart, passionate, principled person.
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Yeah, her last & final appearance on The Cycling Podcast, where she discussed the whole situation, was definitely an inflection point for me.
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I’m sad you feel that way but I believe you’re missing the forest for the trees.
This excuse along with the other contamination excuses are just that. I’m not saying it’s not possible but does anyone really believe they’re all legitimate? Professional athletes are and should be held to a higher standard.
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For a number of reasons, the issue of reproductive autonomy and women having to bear the brunt of what their partners do is very much on my mind. If female athletes (and gay male athletes) are at risk for a positive test because of sexual exposure from their partners, that message should be clearly conveyed, just as the risk of contaminated food is. The higher standard here appears to be “Don’t eat anything that you can’t vouch for” for everybody and “Don’t have sex without condoms if you aren’t 100% sure your partner isn’t using something that is banned (including legitimately prescribed medications”
As is always the case with screening, it fundamentally becomes an optimization trade-off between sensitivity and specificity–as you increase sensitivity, you decrease specificity. As you impose strict standards in terms of both testing and a “no excuses” policy to catch everyone who could possibly be cheating, some innocent people will be caught. As you say, some people citing this cause are probably using it as a cover, while others are probably telling the truth. I’m not sure what the ideal ratio of “Falsely punished/missed cheaters” is. I do know that, in the absence of explicit warnings about the potential for this particular mechanism to cause a positive test, I’m extremely uncomfortable putting the onus on female athletes to police their sexual partners’ activities, especially given the long history of coercion and abuse.
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