Something in the air?

USADA’s Laura Lewis on the carbon-monoxide rebreathing method that’s stirred controversy in the WorldTour ranks

Carbon monoxide has a much higher affinity than oxygen to bind to haemoglobin, meaning that if you breathe it in, you have less oxygen attached to haemoglobin, so you enter a hypoxic state like you would at altitude. Picture the situation as a bus and the seats as haemoglobin. The larger customers are the carbon monoxide and take up all the seats, leaving little room for the thinner oxygen customers! It does eventually unbind (it has a half-life of around 12 hours), but in very high doses – like you’d find with people in garages with exhaust pipes – all the seats are used up, so there’s no room for oxygen and the result is death. But that’s at high doses. We’ve been using it in science for years to…

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Cycling Plus (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024

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