z**c
发帖数: 7595 | 1 往Nature灌水那是一大波人的终身梦想，包括我的老板 ：）
http://club.kdnet.net/dispbbs.asp?page=1&boardid=1&id=8518328
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Why great Olympic feats raisesuspicions
""""Performanceprofiling"""" could help to catch cheaters in sport.
· Ewen Callaway
01 August 2012
At the Olympics,how fast is too fast? That question has dogged Chinese
swimmer Ye Shiwen afterthe 16-year-old shattered the world record in the
women""""s 400-metre individualmedley (400 IM) on Saturday. In the wake of
that race, some swimming expertswondered whether Ye’s win was aided by
performance-enhancing drugs. She hasnever tested positive for a banned
substance and the International OlympicCommittee on Tuesday declared that
her post-race test was clean. The resultingdebate has been tinged with
racial and political undertones, but littlescience. Nature examines whether
and how an athlete""""sperformance history and the limits of human
physiology could be used to catchdopers.
Was Ye’sperformance anomalous?
Yes. Her time inthe 400 IM was more than 7 seconds faster than her time in
the same event at amajor meet in July. But what really raised eyebrows was
her showing in the last50 metres, which she swam faster than US swimmer Ryan
Lochte did when he wongold in the men’s 400 IM on Saturday, with the
second-fastest time ever forthat event.
Doesn""""t a cleandrug test during competition rule out the possibility of
doping?
No, says RossTucker, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town
in SouthAfrica. Athletes are much more likely to dope while in training,
when drugtesting tends to be less rigorous. “Everyone will pass at the
Olympic games.Hardly anyone fails in competition testing,” Tucker says.
Out-of-competitiontests are more likely to catch dopers, he says, but it is
not feasible to testevery elite athlete regularly year-round. Tracking an
athlete over time andflagging anomalous performances would help anti-doping
authorities to makebetter use of resources, says Yorck Olaf Schumacher, an
exercise physiologistat the Medical University of Freiburg in Germany, who
co-authored a 2009 paperproposing that performance profiling be used as an
anti-doping tool1. “I think it’s a good way and a cheap way to narrow
downa large group of athletes to suspicious ones, because after all, the
result ofany doping is higher performance,” Schumacher says.
The ‘biologicalpassport’, which measures characteristics of an athlete’s
blood to look forphysiological evidence of doping, works in a similar way to
performanceprofiling (see """"Racing just to keep up""""). After it
wasintroduced in 2008, cycling authorities flagged irregularities in the
bloodcharacteristics of Antonio Colom, a Spanish cyclist, and targeted drug
teststurned up evidence of the banned blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin
(EPO) in2009.
How wouldperformance be used to nab dopers?
Anti-dopingauthorities need a better way of flagging anomalous performances
or patterns ofresults, says Schumacher. To do this, sports scientists need
to createdatabases that — sport by sport and event by event — record how
athletesimprove with age and experience. Longitudinal records of athletes’
performanceswould then be fed into statistical models to determine the
likelihood that theyran or swam too fast, given their past results and the
limits of human physiology.
The Olympicbiathlon, a winter sport that combines cross-country skiing and
targetshooting, has dabbled in performance profiling. In a pilot project,
scientistsat the International Biathlon Union in Salzburg, Austria, and the
University ofFerrara in Italy, developed a software program that
retroactively analysedblood and performance data from 180 biathletes over
six years to identify thosemost likely to have doped2. The biathlon
federation now uses the software to targetits athletes for drug testing.
Could an athletethen be disciplined simply for performing too well?
“That would beunfair,” says Tucker. “The final verdict is only ever going
to be reached bytesting. It has to be.” In recent years, cycling
authorities have successfullyprosecuted athletes for having anomalous blood
profiles, even when bannedsubstances such as EPO could not be found. But
performance is too far removedfrom taking a banned substance and influenced
by too many outside factors toconvict someone of doping, Tucker says. “When
we look at this young swimmerfrom China who breaks a world record, that’s
not proof of anything. It asks aquestion or two.”
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2012.11109
References
1. Shumacher, Y. O. & Pottgiesser, T. Int.J. Sport. Physiol. Perform. 4,
129–133 (2009).
Show context
2. Manfredini, A. F. et al. J. Sport.Med. Phys. Fit. 51, 153–159 (2011). | j****l
发帖数: 3356 | 2 nature这是不顾自己名声啊
刚注册，灌了篇comment，不知道算不算发了个letter？
【在 z**c 的大作中提到】
: 往Nature灌水那是一大波人的终身梦想，包括我的老板 ：）
: http://club.kdnet.net/dispbbs.asp?page=1&boardid=1&id=8518328
: ------------
: Why great Olympic feats raisesuspicions
: """"Performanceprofiling"""" could help to catch cheaters in sport.
: · Ewen Callaway
: 01 August 2012
: At the Olympics,how fast is too fast? That question has dogged Chinese
: swimmer Ye Shiwen afterthe 16-year-old shattered the world record in the
: women""""s 400-metre individualmedley (400 IM) on Saturday. In the wake of
| z**c
发帖数: 7595 | 3 干脆都移师到那灌得了 ：）
【在 j****l 的大作中提到】
: nature这是不顾自己名声啊
: 刚注册，灌了篇comment，不知道算不算发了个letter？
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