UAE Team Emirates have confirmed that the team no longer uses the controversial carbon monoxide rebreathing technique to measure athlete performance.
Speaking at the team’s media day during their pre-season training camp on Tuesday, Jeroen Swart, performance coordinator, said that UAE Team Emirates have “finished the process” with the technique. He said that it was “an exercise that we co-ordinated over 18 months” to assess rider’s improvements during altitude training camps.
The technique hit the headlines during the 2024 Tour de France when Escape Collective reported that UAE Team Emirates, Visma-Lease a Bike, and Israel-Premier Tech had used it to test rider blood values at the start and end of altitude training camps.
Last month, the UCI called on WADA to “take a position” on the use of carbon monoxide for performance gains, using a similar method known as repeated carbon monoxide inhalation.
Escape Collective‘s investigation found that there was “no hard evidence” that any of the teams mentioned above were using carbon monoxide in that way, though the UCI is concerned about its potential use.
During a question-and-answer session at the UAE training camp, Swart noted that the technique for measuring athlete performance gains has been used in various sports for two decades, then confirmed that his team had stopped using it.
“To give you complete clarity on that, carbon monoxide rebreathing is a technique that has already been validated for 20 years and has been used by climbers, endurance sportsmen and athletes around the world to measure haemoglobin mass when they go to altitude,” Swart said.
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“We’ve been very good with our altitude training camps in the last seven years. We feel that we’ve done a really good job in terms of the benefit, but there’s no way that you can quantify that clearly, other than measuring haemoglobin mass.
“So, two years ago, we decided to assess whether or not our riders were improving to our expectations. And so, it was an exercise that we conducted over 18 months and assessed the haemoglobin mass using carbon monoxide rebreathing which is a very standardised technique with very specific equipment.
“Actually, we finished that process now and our results show that our training camps are actually very well suited to the maximal adaptation for our riders which we see in the performances as well.”
Swart confirmed that the team doesn’t plan to resume the testing in the future, and went on to criticise the “sensationalist” nature of Escape Collective‘s initial article.
“So, we actually don’t need to do the tests any further. We don’t plan to do any more,” he said.
“But I think it’s quite a sensationalist article that’s been published and speculating about using a technique that would be quite complicated and probably not something that I can see anybody actually doing. It doesn’t it doesn’t come across as realistic. So, I think there’s a lot of sensation.”
