Originally Posted by adamastor

Well, I'm from Europe, and I don't know the way you test your riders in the States. In France ( I'm NOT French !) you use "tests longitudinaux" (don't know the translation, HELP?) whereby riders are tested on regular basis (blood, heart, performance, etc). What they are looking for are anomalies or large changes in values from one test to the other. If changes are abnormal or not probable, a more forensic research is needed.

CSC and T-Mobile are important sponsors, and they imposed this method internally in their teams. It's simply a matter of showing "if one of my guys is caught, he's out, and I did everything I could to detect it." Hence regular comments one test results from CSc and T-Mobile doctors.

The reason why French riders have not won any major tour since...???...Fignon? is because of of this medical method in place in their country. The closest to win something (Virenque) was on EPO.