Lance Armstrong Accused of Doping
Lance Armstrong has been accused of using a banned substance while racing the Tour de France. From a security perspective, this isn’t very interesting. Blood and urine tests are used to detect banned substances all the time. But what is interesting is that the urine sample was from 1999, and the test was done in 2005.
Back in 1999, there was no test for the drug EPO. Now there is. Someone took a old usine sample—who knew that they stored old urine samples?—and ran the new test.
This ability of a security mechanism to go back in time is interesting, and similar to police exhuming dead bodies for new forensic analysis, or a new cryptographic technique permitting decades-old encrypted messages to be read.
It also has some serious ramifications for athletes considering using banned substances. Not only do they have to evade any tests that exist today, but they have to at least think about how they could evade any tests that might be invented in the future. You could easily imagine athletes being stripped of their records, medals, and titles decades in the future after past transgressions are discovered.
On the other hand, athletes accused of using banned substances in the past have limited means by which to defend themselves. Perhaps they will start storing samples of their own blood and urine in escrow, year after year, so they’d have well-stored and untainted bodily fluids with which to refute charges of past transgressions.