How do athletes blood dope?
During the 1970-80s, the only available means to blood dope was via transfusions. Although it might seem strange to us in today’s hyper-critical climate, initially blood doping was considered somewhat dubious although not banned outright in sport. In fact at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games the US cycling team used systematic blood transfusions – either reinfusing their own blood (‘autologous’ transfusion) or the blood of relatives/friends (‘homologous’ blood transfusion) in a deliberate attempt to improve their performance. However the subsequent medical outcry after this practice was publicised in the local media led to the International Olympic Committee banning blood transfusions, even though there was no method available to detect this blood doping. Decades later a test was finally introduced to detect when athletes had used homologous transfusions (ironically it was an American cyclist, Tyler Hamilton, who was the first to be sanctioned for transfusion, exactly 20 years after t
