Previously, there has been no method to detect athletes who have used blood transfusions with their own blood. But now a company in Umeå can come up with a solution to the problem.

Christer Malm, who worked on finding a method against doping with blood transfusions for 14 years, has together with a company in Umeå, developed a test kit that has now been sent to Wada's lab in Stockholm, Oslo and Paris.

- Wada's lab will write a report when they have finished their evaluation. It will probably be before the end of the year. After that, Wada's headquarters in Montreal will approve the method, so that it can be used. It is close now, says researcher Christer Malm to SportExpressen.

During the World Championships in Seefeld, the Austrian cross-country skier Max Hauke ​​was caught red-handed when he used blood transfusions. It was on February 27 last year that Austrian police stormed an apartment in the World Cup resort where the cross-country skier was sitting with a cannula in his arm - just hours before he was to compete in the distance of 15 km. 

- It was the worst second of my life, Max Hauke ​​told SportExpressen, about the incident which meant a four-year suspension.

The ski association, the biathlon association, the cycling association and the athletics association are positive about the news about the test kit. 

- Everyone is very interested in this because blood transfusions have been more or less impossible to detect before, says Christer Malm.

Jenny Schulze, group leader at the control unit at Swedish Anti-Doping, is positive - if the method proves to work.

- It is fantastic if we can finally get a method that can say yes or no to if you are blood doped. At the same time, Wada usually makes several different labs test the method so that there is no risk at all that it will show a false positive. False negative is okay, but if you have not been doped and it still shows that you have done so, it simply must not happen. So you have to investigate now, she says to SVT Sport.

Why is it so difficult to detect blood doping today?

- There are two types of blood doping. Either you use someone else's blood, or you use your own blood. If you use someone else's blood, it is easy to detect and it was many years since a method was developed to detect it.

- But if you take out your own blood and then stop it back, it is not visible today if something foreign has entered the body. If you put a lot of blood in, it can be seen on the blood values, but if you take microdoses you may not get that much effect, but it is also much more difficult to detect it in the blood passport, says Schulze.

KLIPP: Was suspended for four years after the scandal (September 22, 2019)

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