As usual, no one's doping

I like to watch the Olympics as much as anyone. One thing's for sure though: we're going to learn from this Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics 2026 that doping is as rare as the blue moon, just like we learned from other Olympics.

We will also learn that any failed test is due to a black-swan event that befell the unfortunate athlete, which in fact, partly explains the first statement.

Long-time reader Antonio R. points me to the first doping finding at these Olympics. Italian biathlete Rebecca Passler failed a test prior to the start of the Olympics, and was immediately suspended; now, according to this Italian report (link), her suspension has been lifted. (Perhaps only temporarily as there are other agencies that will eventually review the case.)

It's because she accidentally ingested the banned substance by eating ... Nutella. Yes, the famous Italian spread made of chocolate and hazelnuts. This surely is a new one. It's also a head-scratcher. If Nutella contains traces of the banned substance, then surely all Italian athletes are aware, no? Reading further, I learned that it's not Nutella but contaminated Nutella. The spoon used to share Nutella among the members is to blame.

How did the banned substance get on the spoon? It's from the athlete's sick mother's cancer medication. According to the reporter, past cases suggest that this still isn't enough to avoid punishment because it's the athlete's responsibility to take all possible precautions.

So, we also get some family drama. Passler's mother didn't want to affect her preparation for these Olympics, so she has hidden her diagnosis. In addition, she hid the cancer medication in some secret cabinet. What is likely true is that the mother doesn't know that the medication contains a substance that is banned by anti-doping agencies.

I'm not here to condemn or condone Passler. While the story requires an unlikely sequence of unlikely events, it is not impossible. I don't know of a foolproof way to know if she is a victim of a black-swan event or not – unless you're in the inner circle of her staff.

I wrote extensively about anti-doping tests in Chapter 4 of Numbers Rule Your World, in the years before Lance Armstrong confessed. My analysis leads me to believe that there are many more false negatives than false positives. Armstrong, you might recall, repeatedly pointed to years of negative test findings to push back on doping rumors.

Also, the term "false positive" is imprecise. To believe Passler's story requires us to accept the initial test result as correct. Her team is, in fact, endorsing the test finding as a true positive!

In the book, I differentiate between a lab false positive, and a real-world false positive. In Passler's case (as in the case of every athlete who happened to have eaten something that happened to contain trace amounts of some banned substance), the lab test is presumed correct; what these athletes are disputing is the cause of the positive result.

There is a key computation in Chapter 4 of Numbers Rule Your World.

The proportion of doping athletes is bounded above by the proportion of tests coming back positive in any Olympics (I'm simplifying a bit by assuming one test per athlete.) If 100 athletes are tested, and 1 tested positive, there can at most be one true positive. If there are more than 1 doper amongst the 100 athletes, then surely the testing program has a false-negative problem. If there are 5 dopers, at least four of them will have negative findings (the false-negative rate is a staggering 80%!!). If there are 10 dopers, at least nine will be cleared.

So, pay attention to the number of positive tests. If this is like other Olympics, the number will be very small. That can be interpreted as very few athletes are doping, or most dopers are evading detection.