Tour d' France champion Chris Froome.getty images
Chris Froome's "fight to clear his name" is to become a "high-stakes battle" with the World Anti-Doping Agency after a new study claimed that the test for asthma medication is "fundamentally flawed," according to Matt Dickinson of the LONDON TIMES. The research paper, published last week in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, is understood to "highlight a key plank" of Froome’s defense -- that WADA’s test for salbutamol is "unreliable and needs to be overhauled." Froome faces a possible ban and the prospect of being stripped of his La Vuelta title "after a urine sample showed an extraordinarily high amount of the asthma medication, above the allowed limit." His legal team is "expected to draw on the independent study," Futility of current urine salbutamol doping control, by researchers at the Centre for Human Drug Research in Leiden, the Netherlands -- to try to demonstrate that WADA’s salbutamol threshold is "unsafe given that levels in urine can be highly variable." The study claimed that on maximum permitted dosage of the drug, as many as 15.4% of tests could turn up a false positive. Given such a statistic, researchers describe the presumption of guilt on an athlete as “completely unacceptable” (LONDON TIMES, 5/7).
