MEMORIES OF REACHING ELEVEN
RECENT RESEARCH SUGGESTS THE BODY NEVER FORGETS DOPING
It’s hardly news that Alejandro Valverde’s 2018 world title polarised opinion. Here’s an incredible one-day and grand tour rider all wrapped up in 61kg of Murcian muscle, who, at nearly 39, continues to defy the ageing process. A rider whose rainbow triumph provided sweet Spanish balm to 15 years of pain in which he’d mounted the world podium six times. Then, of course, you have the charmless man, whose lack of contrition over being caught up in Operación Puerto and two-year ban overshadows every triumph.
He’s served his ban, supporters would argue, and since his 2012 return, there have been no biological anomalies. So, ride on El Bala, ride on? Not quite. A rider recently told me: “Valverde shouldn’t be on the bike. Not because of what he did before but because of how he’s still benefitting. His body learnt to develop. He raised his limits. He was changing his blood for years – he’s 10 years younger!”
That may be true, according to research from the University of Massachusetts. Professor Lawrence Schwartz’s January 2019 paper in the journal Frontiers in Physiology set about proving or disproving the belief that when a muscle grows or shrinks, the number of myonuclei changes. “This phenomenon is known as “the myonuclear domain hypothesis,” Schwartz told me. “When you train, you increase nuclei; when you cease, they wither away.”
Schwartz doesn’t accept the hypothesis: “Work on insects and mice has demonstrated that nuclei persist when muscles atrophy; even when they start to die. This suggests that the adage ‘use it or lose it’ should be ‘use it or lose it until you work at it again.’”
Further work revealed that nuclei, and their ability to drive the regrowth of muscle mass, persists long after testosterone treatments have ended. “This suggests that athletes may benefit from doping long after they run the risk for detection,” Schwartz adds.
Dr Jo Bruusgaard, who also studied the potentially permanent effect of doping, noted that nuclei number in mice remained the same three months after testosterone injection. Three months in the life of a mouse equates to 10 years in the life of a human.
The studies above focused on testosterone. What about EPO or human growth hormone? Research suggests skeletal muscle possesses an ‘epigenetic memory of hypertrophy’. With doping, endurance-related genes whose current ceiling is 10 are cranked up to 11 when training harder through chemical assistance. Epigenetics suggests that genes will forever have ‘memories of previous training’. So even short-term doping has long-term benefits.
There’s also the long-term psychological impact of doping. Tim Noakes’ central governor model of fatigue suggests that the brain, more than factors like glycogen depletion, limits how fast, long and hard each of us can ride. The brain listens to bodily signals and then sets a suitable benchmark that it feels prevents self-harm. Doping, it could be argued, recalibrates these limits permanently.
So what next? Further study of the long-term nuclei impact of doping is the most logical. That’s the muscle’s brain centre, so start there. The problem is you’d need that individual’s nuclei benchmarks to compare not only pre- and post-doping, but also after a period of cold turkey. Monitoring this isn’t impossible but highly improbable, especially when budgets aren’t just tight, they’re under tourniquet.
Geneticists Yannis Pitsiladis and Allen Murray have developed what they stress are reliable tests for EPO. Both feel they have hit a WADA funding brick wall; both suggest anti-doping funds end up being directed to more affordable sociological programmes like education. Still of benefit but not to committed offenders. For these latter individuals, the gains just keep on coming.