According to this guy who has a channel dedicated exclusively to anti-doping(and i had heard about this before as well), the testing begins by analysing your T/E ratio. If it breaks the 4/1 threshold, your sample gets sent to further analysis..
yes and no, but more no than yes.
Theres two different things, the first being an athlete using testosterone specifically.
That will (unless you are administering epitestosterone) cause your t/e ratio to rise (the ratio between testosterone and epitestosterone which normally would be about 1:1).
If you t/e ratio goes over 4:1 (although thats not a hard and fast rule anymore), then that could mean that the athlete is administering exogenous (non natural) testosterone and so they may submit his samples to gc/irms (gas chromatography/isotope ratio mass spectrometry) which is mainly used to detect testosterone of a non andogenous nature.
so yes, on that part he is correct (but like I say 4:1 is really not a hard and fast rule). If an athletes biological passport shows their t/e ratio consistently at .75:1 and suddenly they jump to 2:1 ,that on its own would be enough to warrant further examination. And thats really only a tiny part of the picture
Which is where I get onto the "largely no" aspect. A t/e ratio alone is only a tiny piece of the jigsaw. Usada run full biological passports on every athlete, which means every sample, has its key factors logged, so testosterone and epi-testosterone levels, but also dhea levels, Andro, Etio, LH levels, etc etc
And all of these levels are monitored, (as well as countless others), multiple different things in the blood passport, steroidal passport and endocrine passport are constantly evaluated, and if any of those numbers suddenly seem odd, that will lead to targetted testing, or specific analysis (thats how Jessica Penne was caught)
So no, its really not as simple as a 4:1 t/e ratio being the trigger, there are hundreds of individual things that could be a trigger.
