Hemoglobin/Russians file figure-skating protest

[milztoday]

First the Russians...http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/winter02/gen/news?
id=1338505. They're saying that Slutskaya should get her own medal 
like the Canadians due to biased judging (eventhough she didn't do a 
triple-triple combo and made it a triple-double and eventhough she 
didn't land one of her triples soundly.)

Now, onto hemoglobin.

It's the oxygen carrying component in red blood cells. Oxygen is 
needed by the body to function. There's a bunch of biochemical 
reactions that use oxygen to convert energy for the body. 

There are established normal ranges of hemoglobin for human, 
depending on sex and even racial make-up.  There are also set methods 
to measure hemoglobin. But with anything in science/medicine, there 
are variations of the normal ranges due to laboratory technique and 
the instruments used. To avoid these technical differences, tests 
like these only one reference laboratory is used. I suspect the IOC 
has a set range of "normal" hemoglobin for athletes, male and female.

Medically, there are a variety of reasons for increased hemoglobin, 
ranging from medical conditions to environmental stressors such as 
vigorous exercise and high altitude or blood doping.

Hemoglobin is increased in high altitudes because the concentration 
of oxygen in high altitudes is lower than the concentration of oxygen 
in lower altitudes. Because the oxygen concentration is lower, the 
body needs to produce more hemoglobin in order to trap that oxygen. 
Vigorous exercise basically does the same thing. In order for the 
body to meet the oxygen demands of vigorous exercise, it needs to 
increase it's amount of hemoglobin. 

So what is blood doping? In it's most basic, primative form, blood 
doping can be done by transfusing red blood cells into an athlete 
before an event. The more high tech way to blood dope is to give an 
injection of erythropoetin, which is a chemical that stimulates the 
body to produce red blood cells. This chemical is found naturally in 
the body and is also manufactured for use by people with anemia. The 
theory behing blood doping is that by increasing the amount of oxygen-
carrying cells, you can deliver more oxygen to the muscles, so you 
can increase performance.

So, could a person living in a high altitude normally develop an 
increase in hemoglobin? Yes. However, it would take a while to build 
up that amount of hemoglobin. After a transfusion or after a dose of 
erythropoetin, there is an almost immediate increase in red blood 
cells. It's quite remarkable.

The other thing too and I don't know if the IOC does this is to take 
several samples of blood at different days before an event, like 120 
days, 10 days and 1 day. If there's a difference in the numbers then 
something probably happened.

Milz