The new frontier

This past Sunday evening we happened to catch the CBS network news.  In general I am not a big fan of CBS News these days; things have gone steadily downhill and I think the signal that they were really struggling was the annointment of the queen of fluff journalism as their regular weekday anchor.  But the TV was sitting on that channel when the news came on and one of the headlines caught my attention enough for me to keep the set and that station and watch for a while.

The story of interest was about the ‘new’ drug of choice for athletes who dope, with a slant towards the coming Olympics.  So what is this ‘new’ drug which led them to tack on the story to the national news?  EPO!  (of course we know they mean a synthetic form of EPO).  ‘EPO’ as a new drug?  Is CBS caught in some kind of time warp?  Do they forget that it was EPO that Bjarne admitted last year to having used in 1996, a full 12 years ago?  Or that EPO was front and center in 1998 in the ‘Festina scandal’?   Lots of other times it has made the news in the past 10+ years, so I am at a loss as to how CBS could think that this is a ‘new’ drug of choice.  Of course the story had to mention the failed test of this year’s Italian bad boy, Ricco.  The only thing of real interest in the story was that some researchers in Denmark claim that doping with low levels of synthetic EPO can have a physiological effect that lasts for a while but that any trace that could be tested will disappear rather quickly.  Almost a challenge to dopers to start trying mini-doses to amp up the hematocrit a bit and stay under the testing radar.

Wonder what the next major ‘news’ story they will hype more than a decade too late?