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The ‘biological passport’. Very few commentators and followers of professinal cycling would disagree that this scientific breakthrough potentially offers great scope for our sport to finally break free from the spectre of doping. A much-lauded concept, Wikipedia defines a biological passport as “an individual, electronic record for professional athletes in which profiles of biological markers of doping and results of doping tests are collated over a sustained period of time. It is thought that doping violations can thus be detected by noting variances from an athlete’s established levels outside permissible limits, rather than actively having to catch an offender ‘red handed’ in a drugs test. To date, twelve professional cyclists have fallen foul of the biological passport – the biggest scalps being Dennis Menchov and Jonathan Tiernan-Locke.