Originally Posted by Helmet Head

I read somewhere the half life of the synthetic testosterone is one hour. That's very fast. Also, the theory is that while testosterone is known to be useful for muscle building in a long term high dosages, it can also be useful in small dosages, even one dose, for recovery.

Also, remember that a cyclist can effectively dope as long as his T/E ratio stay below 4:1. That means, practically speaking, they can all take small doses, or, take larger doses combined with epitestosterone. As long as their T/E stays below 4;1, the more expensive test for syn testosterone isn't done.

I suppose it's possible that Floyd took it just that once to recover from his especially bad day.

But it's also possible that he, along with everyone else, or most everyone else, doped every day (normally in an way that does not cause one to exceed the 4:1 T/E limit), and that particular day something went wrong. Maybe he left the patch on longer than normal, maybe the epitestosterone broke down faster than anticipated. Maybe each patch contains both T and E, and while he normally applies only one patch, in this case he decided to double up, but maybe the ratio synthetic T & E that you need to take is non linear, so doubling didn't work as anticipated? Who knows? Something went wrong...