Cyclists: "If you dope, you won’t get girls!”

SHOOT: The biological passport looks like a winner.

clipped from www.nytimes.com CHIAVENNA, Italy — A sign posted just a few miles from the finish of Stage 7 of the Giro d’Italia revealed a warning to the riders: “If you dope, you won’t get girls!” it said in Italian. “A lot of us have been pushing them to take some action already,” said Bob Stapleton, the owner of Team Columbia-Highroad, which has been the fastest team at the Giro so far. His rider, the fresh-faced 21-year-old Edvald Boasson Hagen of Norway, won the seventh stage Friday, but Danilo Di Luca retained the leader’s pink jersey and has a five-second lead over Thomas Lovkvist going into the eighth stage. Those blood records, collected since the beginning of 2008, build a picture of several values in an athlete’s blood over a series of tests. Changes in an athlete’s blood profile, called a biological passport, could indicate doping. A team of scientists analyzes those profiles and sees how the profile changes in comparison with a baseline drawn from earlier tests. clipped from topics.nytimes.com